Association mining often produces large collections of association rules that are difficult to understand and put into action. In this paper, we have designed a novel notion of combined patterns to extract useful and actionable knowledge from a large amount of learned rules. We also present definitions of combined patterns, design novel metrics to measure their interestingness and analyze the redundancy in combined patterns. Experimental results on real-life social security data demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of the proposed approach in extracting actionable knowledge from complex data.