OBJECTIVES: Appropriate use of combined inhalation therapies for airway disease patients is likely to reduce the undesirable health utilization, improve patients’ health-related quality of life, smooth the decline of pulmonary function and prevent the mortality. A secondary data analysis was performed to describe the utilization of two types of combined inhaler therapies among the patients diagnosed with airway diseases for quality improvement of medical care. METHODS: The claimed administration data with visits using two types of combined inhalers (four various dosages and dosage forms of Seretide and one Symbicort turbulaler) and the corresponding visits’ diseases and demographic information from the 2000-bed medical center affiliated to a medical university in Taiwan were retrieved and analyzed. There were up to five diagnoses listed in the dataset. The descriptive analysis was performed to examine the trends of different types of combined inhalers being prescribed for patients diagnosed with corresponding airway diseases (i.e., ICD9: 491, 492,493,494,496, 518) in the year of 2009. RESULTS: Of 2,495 patients being prescribed with the combined inhaler therapies (accounted for 9273 total visits), male was dominated (57.7% vs. 42.3%), average age was 56.7 (± 22.1) year-old and more than 80% were prescribed by the pulmonary physicians. Less than 2% had experience of switching inhalers within one year. Only 55.4% were prescribed with coded airway diseases (asthma and COPD accounted for 25.2% and 21.96%, respectively). Further, 50.6% of them were prescribed with inhalers once or twice within one year. These prescribing patterns might encounter the “drug choice problems.”   CONCLUSIONS: The prescribing patters of combined inhaler therapies seem problematic in this health setting and need to be examined persistently and periodically. To ensure appropriate usages of these inhalers, it is necessary to further study the contributing factors and to investigate the possible resolutions to improve the quality of medical care.