Abstract: A computer-implemented method includes: (1) receiving at least one patient note from an electronic medical record (EMR) system as a source text narrative; (2) deriving lexical chains corresponding to themes in the source text narrative; (3) scoring the lexical chains with respect to a medical taxonomy to identify higher scoring lexical chains among the lexical chains; (4) scoring sentences in the source text narrative with respect to the higher scoring lexical chains to identify higher scoring sentences among the sentences; and (5) creating a textual summary of the source text narrative from the higher scoring sentences.