Patent ID: 8145716

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, by a computing device, an electronic mail message being sent from a clinical care provider to a recipient; processing, by the computing device, the electronic mail message to add one or more semantic qualifiers to contextualize the electronic mail message as being associated with a medical context, the medical context having a number of electronic mail content keywords or key fields associated with pre-determined rate information; generating, by the computing device, at least one quantitative cost metric value for the electronic mail message by applying the pre-determined rate information associated with the electronic mail content keywords or key fields of the medical context, based at least in part on one or more pieces of content contained in the electronic mail message; generating, by the computing device, metadata representing the at least one quantitative cost metric; associating, by the computing device, the metadata with the electronic mail message; and sending, by the computing device, the electronic mail message including the associated metadata.