Skip to main content
The most common follow-up model today is one appointment a month and thirty days of silence in between. Everything that matters happens in those thirty days: the trip, the heavy work week, the weekend that throws the routine off. By the time the patient is back in your office, most of it has already turned to fog. They report what they remember — and what they remember is usually what happened in the last three or four days. The weekly questionnaire exists to cover that gap. But it only works when you understand that you are building an intervention, not a data-collection form. This series of guides gathers best practices for dietitians, psychologists, physicians, coaches, and other health professionals who follow patients with weekly questionnaires in LiveClin.

​
The questionnaire works for two people

For the patient, it is a self-monitoring instrument. Answering is already the intervention: when someone has to rate their own sleep seven days in a row, sleep enters that person’s field of attention, and they start acting on it before you say anything. In a 2009 meta-regression on healthy eating and physical activity interventions, Michie and colleagues found that interventions combining self-monitoring with at least one other self-regulation technique were significantly more effective than the rest. For you, the questionnaire is triage. It does not diagnose and it does not replace the appointment. It exists so you arrive at the appointment with four weeks of history instead of four days of memory, and so you can spot mid-course who needs contact before the next appointment.
The questionnaire belongs to the patient before it belongs to you. If it only serves you, the patient notices and stops answering.

​
Reporting and asking are different things

This is the most expensive mistake made with weekly questionnaires: the patient answers “the week was terrible” and you feel you have to fix the terrible week. You reply, you advise, you change the plan. Multiply that by thirty patients and you have an exhausted professional doing work nobody asked for. The weekly questionnaire is a reporting channel — a snapshot of the week, recorded to be compared with other snapshots. A bad week that gets recorded is a questionnaire that worked. Questions, requests, and urgent matters belong in support, the channel where you already have an agreed response time. Separating the two channels:
  • Lowers your anxiety, because you stop reading every answer as a call for help.
  • Lowers the patient’s dependency, since they stop using the questionnaire for emotional regulation (“can I eat this?”).
  • Improves the data, because people report more honestly when they know they won’t be corrected for it.
Make it explicit, in the message that comes with the link, that the questionnaire is a record and that questions go to support. You’ll find a ready-made script in Schedule sending.

​
A setback is information

If you agreed to cut back on alcohol and the patient rated alcohol low for four weeks in a row, the questionnaire did not fail. It recorded that the agreed strategy did not work in that context — which is exactly the data you need to adjust your approach at the next appointment. Behavior change rarely happens in seven days. What you measure weekly is progress, and progress can be maintenance, a smaller drop than expected, or “I managed it on two of the seven days, when it used to be zero”.

​
The guides in this series

Ideal length

How many questions to include and how much answering time your questionnaire can cost.

Structure blocks

The five-block architecture, from the global anchor to the reflection question.

Choose scales

Which response mode to use for each type of information.

Write questions

The twelve writing rules that protect data quality.

Ready questions

A question bank by field and a complete 10-question template.

Schedule sending

Which day to send, response deadline, and how to present it to the patient.

Read responses

A reading routine and the four triggers that justify contact.

Avoid mistakes

The mistakes that break follow-up and how to keep the questionnaire healthy.

Ethical care

Data minimization, consent, and scope limits.

​
Checklist before you save

In LiveClin, questions can no longer be edited once the questionnaire is saved. Review this list before you finish:
  • Between 8 and 12 questions
  • Total time under 180 seconds, per the time budget
  • At most one required open question
  • Weight and photo, if present, marked as not required
  • Every question has an explicit recall window (“in the last 7 days”)
  • No question contains two ideas
  • No question contains a judging word
  • All scales have labeled endpoints
  • All scales point in the same direction: higher is better
  • Single-choice options are mutually exclusive and cover every case
  • A required explanation sits on the alert options, and only on those
  • The weights reflect that patient’s goal
  • Every question changes some decision
  • You opened Preview and read everything as if you were the patient
  • You answered the questionnaire once, as a test patient
  • The usage agreement is settled with the patient
  • Michie, S., Abraham, C., Whittington, C., McAteer, J., & Gupta, S. (2009). Effective techniques in healthy eating and physical activity interventions: a meta-regression. Health Psychology.
  • Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1982). Control theory: a useful conceptual framework for personality-social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin.
  • Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of self-regulation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.