1. A system for controlling access to medical documents associated with a user in a patient database, comprising: a processing device that includes: a user interface that receives a topic and a set of permissions from a user; a document analyzer that analyzes content of the medical documents associated with the user to find a plurality of documents relating to the topic; a property finder that analyzes the content of the plurality of documents to find at least one distinguishing property of the documents relating to the topic; and a document selector that selects a set of documents based on the at least one distinguishing property; and wherein the user interface enables the user to select some or all of the set of documents found by the document analyzer; and an associating subsystem that associates the set of permissions with the selected set of documents to obtain an access control policy; a non-transitory memory element that stores the access control policy for subsequent access control to the set of documents; and an access control subsystem that: receives an access request for one or more of the medical documents associated with the user from another user, retrieves the access control policy from the memory element, and controls access to each of the one or more medical documents associated with the user based on the access control policy.