Patent Document ID: 8874460
Application ID: 13158264
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method for importing health care marketing data, the method comprising: obtaining, by the computer, a healthcare-marketing-related record comprising data structured according to a plurality of fields of a plurality of field types; obtaining, by the computer, a plurality of data validity rules comprising a plurality of field-specific validity rules and at least one field-generic validity rule, each field-specific validity rule indicating data that can be validly included in a particular one of said plurality of field types, the at least one field-generic validity rule indicating data that can be validly included in any of said plurality of field types; obtaining, by the computer, a plurality of field-specific data canonicity rules, each canonicity rule indicating a standard form for representing data in a particular one of said plurality of field types; cleaning and normalizing, by the computer, said healthcare-marketing-related record according to said plurality of data validity rules and said plurality of field-specific data canonicity rules, respectively; and identifying, by the computer, a pre-existing healthcare-marketing-related record in a persistent healthcare-marketing database that is potentially duplicative of said cleaned and normalized healthcare-marketing-related record, the persistent healthcare-marketing database comprising a plurality of pre-existing healthcare-marketing-related records; and determining, by the computer, whether said healthcare-marketing-related record is an automatically determinable match, an automatically determinable no-match, or a non-automatically-determinable possible-match in comparison with said identified pre-existing healthcare-marketing-related record by: obtaining, by the computer, a configurable field-wise scoring table comprising, for each of said plurality of fields, at least three field-specific comparison scores comprising a field-wise match score, a field-wise no-match score, and a field-wise possible-match score; determining a plurality of field-wise comparison values corresponding to said healthcare-marketing-related record and said identified pre-existing healthcare-marketing-related record; determining whether each of the plurality of field-wise comparison values corresponds to a field-wise match, a field-wise no-match, or a field-wise possible-match based on a comparison of each field-wise comparison value to one or more field-level thresholds; determining a plurality of field-wise comparison scores according to said field-wise scoring table and whether each of the plurality of field-wise comparison values corresponds to a field-wise match, a field-wise no-match, or a field-wise possible-match; determining a record-wise match score according to said plurality of field-wise comparison scores; and comparing the determined record-wise match score to one or more record-level thresholds.