The most important part of your Medicare Annual Wellness Visit may happen days before it, at your kitchen table, with a pen in your hand. That is where many patients meet the Health Risk Assessment, the questionnaire your provider asks you to complete as part of the visit. It can look like routine paperwork. It is not. Done early, it quietly decides what your care team notices and what ends up in your personalized prevention plan.
What this questionnaire actually asks
The Health Risk Assessment, or HRA, asks how you see your own health, and it reaches well beyond diagnoses. It covers your medical and family history, your medicines, and the other clinicians who care for you. It asks about everyday life, how safely you move around your home, whether you have fallen, how you eat and sleep, and how you feel in mood and memory. That breadth is the point. Medicare describes the wellness visit as a conversation based visit built around a personalized prevention plan, and the HRA is the raw material that plan is built from.
An answer about unsteady balance points toward fall prevention. A note about low mood opens a conversation about depression screening. None of that surfaces as clearly when the questions are skipped.
Why before the visit changes the visit
When the HRA arrives ahead of time, the care team can read before it reacts. Staff can flag missing screenings and vaccines, check the medicine list against the chart, and note where a patient needs more time. The provider walks in knowing which risks deserve attention first, instead of spending the appointment collecting facts. Patients benefit, too. Answering at home, with medicine bottles nearby, produces truer answers than a clipboard in a busy waiting room.
The rushed version is familiar. The form is handed out at check in, half completed, and set aside. The visit becomes an interview about the past instead of a plan for the year ahead. It is one more reason the benefit goes underused: by CMS figures, fewer than half of eligible Medicare beneficiaries, about 45 percent, receive an Annual Wellness Visit each year.
How good practices build the foundation early
- Send it early, and say why. A short note explaining that the answers shape the prevention plan, sent with the appointment reminder, earns more care than a bare attachment.
- Offer more than one way to answer. A portal works for some patients and shuts others out. Paper, a phone call with staff, or help from a family member should all be welcome routes.
- Ask for the medicine list by name. Prescriptions, over the counter products, and supplements, ideally copied from the bottles at home, because that is where safety problems often hide.
- Review it as a team before the day. Flag falls, mood, memory, and safety concerns where the provider will see them first, not buried in the chart.
- Confirm sensitive answers in private. Mood, memory, alcohol, and safety at home deserve a calm check during the visit, so patients can add what they hesitated to write.
A word to patients: answer like it matters
Treat the questionnaire as part of your care, not a toll you pay to reach the doctor. Answer honestly, including the small things, the dizzy spell, the supplement you are unsure about, the nights you sleep badly. Your team cannot plan around a risk it never hears about.
Why we built AWV-AI™ the way we did
Axiom Preventive Health Systems is a Fort Worth health technology company founded in 2026. Our AWV-AI™ prototype, now live for demonstration on synthetic data only and not for clinical use, was built around the full wellness visit workflow, including a structured Health Risk Assessment completed before the visit and a worklist showing flagged risks with plain language reasons. Prevention works best when the foundation is laid before anyone walks into the exam room.
If your practice wants wellness visits that start prepared instead of rushed, we would welcome the conversation via our Contact page.
Preventive care, intelligently orchestrated.