Described herein are technologies pertaining to automatic generation of an executive summary (explanation) of a medical event in an electronic medical record (EMR) of a patient. A medical event in the EMR is automatically identified, and a search is conducted over a document corpus based upon the identified medical event. A document retrieved as a result of the search is analyzed for a portion of text to act as an executive summary for the medical event. Each portion of text in the document is assigned a score, and the portion of text assigned the highest score is utilized as the executive summary for the medical event.