HMM Clinic · Onboarding questionnaire

Questionnaire changes

Exact edits to the Root Cause Assessment onboarding form, written so they can be transcribed straight into a form builder. Every question here is portable, so these hold whether the form stays in Practice Better or moves.

2026-08-11 · 8 conversions, 6 additions, 1 structural

Fifteen edits. None of them add length the client will feel, because eight of them replace an open text box with a tap.

Do these before the first client fills the form

Every question changed after clients start submitting means either reparsing history by hand or living with two incompatible data shapes forever. Today this is an afternoon of form editing.

One principle behind all of it. A woman fills this out on a bad day. Every open text box is work; every tap is not. Constraining these answers makes the form faster for her and makes it scoreable, which is unusual. Most data-quality improvements cost the user something. These do not.
← Overview

Convert to scales

All eight are open text boxes today. Use the same four-point frequency scale on the first five so the client learns the pattern once.

Currently open text

Do you often feel excessively hungry?

Replace with

How often do you feel hungry again soon after eating?

Never   Occasionally   Often   Daily

Blood sugar. Reads against fasting insulin, glucose and GlycoMark.

Currently open text

Do you have little or no appetite?

Replace with

How often do you have little or no appetite?

Never   Occasionally   Often   Daily

Digestive function, thyroid, and low stomach acid patterns.

Currently open text

Do you often crave sugar?

Replace with

How often do you crave sugar or carbohydrates?

Never   Occasionally   Often   Daily

One of the strongest blood sugar signals on the whole form.

Currently open text

Do you often crave salt?

Replace with

How often do you crave salt or salty foods?

Never   Occasionally   Often   Daily

Adrenal and electrolyte patterns. Reads against sodium, potassium and the sodium to potassium ratio.

Currently open text

Do you often feel tired after meals?

Replace with

How often do you feel tired or sluggish within an hour after eating?

Never   Occasionally   Often   Daily

Post-meal glucose response. Pairs directly with GlycoMark, which is the reason that marker was added to the panel.

Currently open text

Do you experience digestive difficulties?

Replace with a checklist, then keep the open box as a follow-up

Which of these do you experience? Check all that apply.

Bloating   Gas   Constipation   Diarrhoea   Heartburn or reflux   Nausea   Stomach pain   None of these

Anything else about your digestion you would like us to know?

[ open text, optional ]

Keep the free text. It is genuinely useful. The checklist just makes the common answers comparable across clients.

Currently two open text boxes

How many days per week do you experience constipation? / diarrhea?

Replace with numbers

In a typical week, how many days do you experience constipation?

[ number, 0 to 7 ]

In a typical week, how many days do you experience diarrhoea?

[ number, 0 to 7 ]

A number instead of "a few, depends on the week."

Currently open text

How often do you have a bowel movement?

Replace with a picker

How often do you have a bowel movement?

More than 3 times a day
1 to 3 times a day
Every other day
About twice a week
Less than twice a week

Thyroid, motility and detox capacity all read here.

← Overview

New questions

Why these matter more than they look. Each one is core to a clinical priority the SOP explicitly names. Without them, those priorities can only ever score from the blood panel, which means they can never converge with symptoms, which means they can never rank confidently. The form is currently blind to three of the ten priorities it is meant to find.
New · thyroid, iron, circulation

Do you tend to feel colder or warmer than the people around you?

Usually colder, especially hands and feet
About the same as everyone else
Usually warmer, I overheat easily
It varies a lot

Temperature intolerance is a first-line thyroid question and the form does not ask it anywhere.

New · thyroid, iron, protein status

Have you noticed changes in your hair, skin or nails? Check all that apply.

Hair shedding or thinning
Brittle or splitting nails
Dry or rough skin
Hair feels dry or brittle
None of these

Reads on thyroid, ferritin and protein status at once. Cheap question, high yield.

New · the one the product is named after

Over the past month, how often have you been bothered by each of the following?

Grid, each row: Never / Several days / More than half the days / Nearly every day

Low or down mood
Anxiety or feeling on edge
Irritability or a short fuse
Brain fog or trouble concentrating
Low motivation

The form asks about stress and about the cycle, but never asks directly and comparably about mood itself. On a product called the Mood Root Cause Assessment, that is the gap that matters most. A grid keeps it to one screen.

New · iron, blood pressure, adrenal

Do you feel dizzy or lightheaded when you stand up quickly?

Never   Occasionally   Often   Daily

One line, reads on three separate priorities.

New · hormonal patterns

Do you get headaches or migraines?

No
Yes, but not related to my cycle
Yes, and they cluster around my period
Yes, and they cluster around ovulation
Yes, and I am not sure of the pattern

Cycle-timed headaches are a distinct hormonal signal and the timing is the whole value of the question.

New · scoring the client's own priorities

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much is your top health concern affecting your daily life right now?

[ 1 to 10 scale ]

The form already asks for her top five concerns as free text. One severity number turns that list into something you can weigh against the clinical ranking, and the gap between what she thinks is wrong and what the panel says is worth showing her in the report.

← Overview

Draw context

This one is not on the onboarding form. It has to be captured at the blood draw, because the answers do not exist yet when she fills out onboarding. Make it a short second form sent when the lab requisition goes out, or three questions the practitioner records when results arrive.

What date was your blood drawn?

[ date ]

Had you fasted for at least 10 hours before your draw?

Yes   No   Not sure

Fasting glucose, insulin and triglycerides are uninterpretable without this. A non-fasted draw does not invalidate the panel, but reading it as fasted does.

What was the first day of your last period before the draw?

[ date, with a "not applicable" option ]

Several markers move across the cycle. The lab pipeline already has a cycle_dependent state built into its scoring model, so the machinery to use this exists and is currently being fed nothing.

← Overview

Leave alone

The menstrual cycle section is the best-built part of this form. Flow rated 1 to 10, clot size, clot frequency, days of bleeding and bleeding colour together give a genuine menstrual blood loss estimate. That sits directly against ferritin, transferrin saturation, haemoglobin, MCV and RDW, and heavy flow plus large frequent clots plus low ferritin is the cleanest convergence this entire panel can produce. It is also a finding that changes a woman's life. Do not simplify it.

Also leave as is:

  • The typical-day walkthrough. It is the single richest field in the document, carrying meal timing, caffeine, supplement timing, work rhythm and wind-down in one paragraph. It gets its own extraction pass in the pipeline.
  • The supplements, medications, birth control and diagnoses tables. Already structured, already parseable.
  • The environmental exposure grid. Past and present columns are exactly right.
  • The trauma and life experiences question. Optional, gently worded, and appropriately open. Never constrain that one.

One small fix while you are in there

The "Foods you avoid" table has two columns both labelled Food, with the third labelled Symptoms or reason. One of the first two is almost certainly meant to be something else. Worth checking against the live form before transcribing anything.