Background: The process of identifying record pairs that represent the same entity (duplicate records) is technically known as record linkage and is one of the essential elements of data cleansing. This paper proposes a fast and efficient method for linkage detection within the healthcare domain. The features of the proposed approach are an embedded fast blocking method with a string matching function that accounts for keystroke mistakes made during data entry of a patient's name and the addition of a module that dynamically generates blocks of possible associated and unique records.