Unsupervised clinical relevancy ranking of structured medical records to retrieve condition-specific information in the emergency department

•Decision making in the Emergency Department requires fast identification of clinical information relevant to the patient’s complaint.•Existing information retrieval solutions focus on patient cohort identification and lack clinical relevancy ranking.•We found that different chief complaints pose almost completely different information needs.•A data-driven unsupervised method can rank clinical information items with as accurately as human experts but with zero manual effort.