## create reproducible example ##

set.seed(3)

data <- data.frame(
  patient = 1:10,
  var1 = sample(c("Yes", "No"), 10, replace = TRUE),
  var2 = sample(c("Yes", "No"), 10, replace = TRUE),
  var3 = sample(c("Yes", "No"), 10, replace = TRUE),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
  row.names = NULL
)

data[data$patient %in% c(3, 5), c("var1", "var2", "var3")] <- "No"

vnms <- c("var1", "var2", "var3") # you will do this programmatically

## The code starts here. Obviously, you can turn this into a function and I'd probably recommend that.
 ## PURRR CODE

data$summary_var <- purrr::map(.x = data$patient,
           .f = function(x) ifelse(any(data[data[["patient"]] == x, vnms] == "Yes"), "Yes", "No"))

## LOOP CODE
data$summary_var <- "No"

for (patient.i in data$patient) {
  if (any(data[data[["patient"]] == patient.i, vnms] == "Yes")) {
    data[data[["patient"]] == patient.i, "summary_var"] <- "Yes"
  }
}