Most of Information Retrieval models for documents are intended for SGML-like structured documents. In the context of medical informatics, the Patient Record document needs a looser structuration process as an a priori structure can hardly be defined. Thus we propose an authoring tool that allows to annotate embedded information, i.e. to give them a context, with qualifiers that are stored in a thesaurus rather than in SGML-like DTD. The retrieval process in the Patient Records collection takes into account the flexibility of the qualifying process while reformulating the queries (synonymy, generalization and specialization relationships between qualifiers).