Damage assessment of infrastructure is a valuable tool for identifying severe distress and needs relating to repair and replacement. Although significant progress has been made towards the assessment of existing structures, predicting the structural response of reinforced concrete components under different stress conditions remains a difficult task. This paper focuses on the implementation of visually observed concrete crack data (i.e. crack widths and orientations) to estimate the structural response of cracked reinforced concrete elements. A smeared crack continuum model, namely the disturbed stress field model, is used as the foundation of the proposed crack-informed modelling procedure. Well-documented experimental crack data from reinforced concrete panel element tests in the literature have been used to evaluate suitability of the proposed modelling procedure for crack-informed structural assessment applications. It was observed that the proposed modelling approach was able to capture the key responses of the specimens in most cases. A mean absolute error of 13.7% was obtained for the relative residual strength of all specimens used for validation purposes.