Case Study: HealthLink Dimensions achieves clean, standardized, geocoded physician data with Melissa's Data Quality Suite

HealthLink Dimensions Combats Constantly Changing Data with Verification Tools

HealthLink Dimensions, an Atlanta-based provider of content-rich healthcare databases covering over 2.3 million physicians and allied health professionals, faced the challenge of constantly changing, multisourced data—common problems included inaccurate phone/fax numbers, duplicate records, and a 2–3% monthly shift in demographic information. To address this, HealthLink chose Melissa’s Data Quality Suite (Address, Phone, Email, Name and GeoCoder objects) to clean, standardize and validate its incoming data streams.

Using Melissa’s Data Quality Suite integrated into HealthLink’s .NET and SQL processes, the company now updates and validates millions of records each month, appends latitude/longitude, maintains multiple addresses per provider, and eliminates duplication at load time. The Melissa solution reduced manual phone-validation effort and labor costs by enabling targeted statistical sampling, improved data accuracy for client queries by proximity, and helped HealthLink deliver a more reliable physician database for downstream directory, list and analytics use.

HealthLink Dimensions

Chris Lloyd

Director of Database Services