Mechanisms are provided for determining values to associate with medical conditions of a patient. A patient assessment is received that comprises a natural language question and a corresponding answer, about a patient, provided in response to the question. Cognitive natural language processing is performed on the patient assessment to extract features from the natural language question and corresponding answer. The extracted features are evaluated within a context of a pre-existing electronic medical record of the patient. A value for a medical condition of the patient is determined based on results of the evaluation and stored in the electronic medical record for the patient.