Mechanisms are provided for determining the meaning of medical values in natural language content. The mechanisms receive patient information from a source which includes at least one of text or a numerical value indicative of a medical value corresponding to a patient. The mechanisms perform cognitive natural language processing on a context of the text or numerical value in the patient information and determine a meaning of the medical value based on results of the cognitive natural language processing. The mechanisms then process the patient information from the source based on the determined meaning of the medical value.