Primary care physicians (PCPs) are responsible for reviewing and understanding a patient’s medical history to make informed decisions regarding care. However, a variety of factors impede this process, including: the increasing complexity and number of diagnostic tests and treatments, health information exchange standards that may add more information to the medical record, and the need to efficiently see more patients in less time. These obstructions can lead to an inhibition of dialogue between patients and providers, and possibly even medical errors.

Despite improvements in its diagnosis and treatment, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The high degree of mortality associated with this cancer, and the spectrum of different treatment options (which themselves involve significant morbidity), creates a difficult situation in which a patient is faced with critical, if not life-changing decisions. In an effort to make informed decisions, many turn to the Internet to find information on their disease.

An appropriate review of a patient’s medical record often requires that a physician review multiple clinical documents while mentally noting issues related to the case. Physicians must review what the findings were, the chronology of events, spatial/temporal patterns of disease progression, the effects of interventions and the possible causal lines of explanation of observed findings. Among all this data, the physician must filter out information irrelevant to the current clinical context of care.