Embodiments of the invention include methods, systems, and computer program products for generating a medical problem list. A non-limiting example of the method includes receiving, by a processor, a plurality of disease categories. A disease category set that includes a plurality of top level disease categories is defined using the processor, wherein the disease category set is based at least in part upon the plurality of disease categories. The processor is used to extract a plurality of candidate training problems from an electronic patient record training set. The processor is used to assign each of the candidate training problems to the plurality of top level disease categories. The processor is used to generate a disease category model for each of the top level disease categories from the electronic patient record training set using a machine learning technique.