The form is the easy part. The logic behind it is the product.
Most writing about telehealth intake stops at the form builder: pick Typeform or Jotform, add your questions, connect it to email. That is the part a weekend can solve. The part that actually carries a GLP-1 program is what the intake does with the answers: which ones stop everything, which ones go to a provider, which ones are fine, and when in that sequence a patient is allowed to pay. Get that wrong and you either charge people you cannot treat or wave through people you should have caught. Get it right and the intake does real work before a clinician ever opens the chart.
To be clear about lanes from the start, the clinical rules here belong to your medical director and provider team, not to us. Nothing in this piece is medical advice, and the examples are drawn from the prescribing information to show the shape of the logic, not to define your protocol. What a web team owns is building the intake so those rules execute reliably, in the right order, at the right time, and leave a record.
Asynchronous means the safety checks cannot wait for a human.
Asynchronous intake, sometimes called store and forward, is the model most GLP-1 programs run on: the patient answers a structured questionnaire, submits it, and a licensed provider reviews it and decides later. It scales because no one has to be on a call at the same time as the patient. That same quality is the reason the questionnaire has to be smart on its own. There is no clinician in the room to notice a red flag in real time, so the first screen for the clearest risks has to be built into the flow itself, and everything else has to arrive at the provider as a clean, complete, structured record rather than a wall of free text.
That reframes the intake from a contact form into a piece of clinical infrastructure. It is doing triage before triage.
Hard stops versus provider review.
The single most important design decision is recognizing that not every concerning answer is the same kind of answer. There are two mechanisms, and they are not interchangeable.
A hard stop ends the standard flow immediately. It is reserved for answers the clinical protocol treats as absolute, where no amount of context changes the outcome, so there is no reason to collect a payment or route to a busy provider. The patient is shown a clear, respectful explanation and an off ramp, not a dead end.
A routed flag does not stop anything. It tags the submission for a provider to look at with extra care, and it may ask follow up questions, but the decision stays with the clinician. Most of the clinically interesting answers live here, because most of medicine is context.
Collapsing these two into one is where intakes go wrong. Treating a routable nuance as a hard stop turns away patients a provider would have helped. Treating an absolute contraindication as a mere flag pushes a decision the protocol already made onto a provider who is now reviewing something that should never have reached them.
What a hard stop actually looks like in a GLP-1 intake.
The clearest examples come straight from the prescribing information, which is why they make good illustrations even though your protocol is the authority. The Wegovy label for semaglutide carries a boxed warning for the risk of thyroid C-cell tumors, including medullary thyroid carcinoma, and states that the medication is contraindicated in patients with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or with Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2, and in patients with a known hypersensitivity to the drug. The GIP and GLP-1 medicines in this class carry the same boxed warning. Those are the textbook shape of an absolute stop: a yes to the thyroid or MEN 2 history, or to a prior serious reaction, ends the standard flow rather than routing it.
Other answers are the routed kind. A history of pancreatitis, gallbladder disease, certain concurrent medications, or a BMI near the edge of eligibility are the sort of thing a provider weighs rather than a form rejects. The label indication itself frames the eligibility gate many programs encode, treating a BMI of thirty and above, or twenty seven and above with at least one weight related condition, as the threshold, with the clinical team deciding exactly how to apply it. Pregnancy is commonly handled as a stop. Age below the program's minimum is usually a stop as well.
The point is not this specific list, which your medical director sets and maintains as labels and guidance change. The point is the architecture: the intake has to know, for every clinically meaningful question, whether a given answer stops, routes, or passes, and it has to behave that way every single time.
Stop before the payment, not after.
Order matters more than almost anything else in the flow, and the rule is simple: run the disqualifying logic before you ask for money. A patient who gives an answer that is an absolute contraindication should never reach a checkout. Charging a card and then declining the person for something they already told you is how a program generates refunds, chargebacks, support tickets, and a story that looks bad to a processor reviewing the funnel, and it is difficult to justify taking payment for care you were never going to deliver.
The sequence that holds up puts the state and eligibility gate and the hard-stop questions first, collects payment once a patient is plausibly eligible and headed into the clinical review, and leaves the final decision with the provider. If the provider later declines based on the fuller picture, that is a clean, documented clinical decision with a clear refund path, not a surprise the checkout created.
Build the record the provider is going to stand behind.
Because the provider reviews asynchronously, the quality of their decision is capped by the quality of what the intake hands them. A good submission is structured, not a paragraph of free text: discrete fields for the answers that matter, the hard-stop and flag results computed and attached, the BMI calculated rather than left for the provider to work out, and a timestamped record of what the patient was shown and agreed to. That record is also the thing that answers the question a medical board, LegitScript, or a payment processor eventually asks, which is whether a legitimate clinical evaluation stood behind the prescription.
An intake that captures clean data, stops the clearly disqualified, routes the ambiguous to a real clinician, records the provider's decision, and never prescribes on its own is the evidence that the evaluation was real. That is also why the software must never be the thing that approves care. The provider approves; the software prepares the decision and preserves it.
Where this sits in the funnel.
Put together, the flow has a deliberate order. The marketing storefront explains the program and sets expectations. The state gate confirms a provider is licensed where the patient is. The clinical intake runs the hard stops and the flags and computes eligibility. Payment happens only once the patient is plausibly eligible and moving into review. A provider evaluates the record and either prescribes or declines. Then fulfillment and follow up begin. The handoff from storefront to clinical intake is the same seam described in corporate practice of medicine, your website, the MSO and the friendly PC, and the end to end connection of those steps is the subject of telehealth intake, booking, checkout and follow up.
A build checklist.
- Get the clinical protocol in writing from the medical director: every contraindication, every threshold, and for each one whether it stops, routes, or passes.
- Implement hard stops and routed flags as two distinct mechanisms, and make sure a hard stop cannot be bypassed by going back or editing an answer.
- Order the flow so the state gate and the disqualifying questions run before checkout, and payment never precedes eligibility.
- Capture structured data, compute BMI and the rule results in the system, and attach them to the submission rather than leaving the provider to reconstruct them.
- Record what the patient saw, what they agreed to, and the provider's final decision, with timestamps, as the audit trail.
- Make sure the software never issues a prescription on its own. It prepares and preserves the decision a licensed provider makes.
This is web and systems architecture guidance, not medical advice, and it does not define your clinical criteria. The contraindications, thresholds, and routing belong to your medical director and provider team, informed by the current prescribing information and standard of care, and the label details here are illustrations of the logic rather than your protocol. What ToolBX Media builds is the intake that executes that protocol inside a working funnel, which is the work in telehealth and GLP-1 website development, and the review that reads the same flow for a legitimate clinical evaluation is covered in the web developer's checklist for passing LegitScript the first time. Have your clinical team own the rules and review the flow before it goes live.
Common questions
What is asynchronous or store and forward telehealth intake?
It is an intake where the patient completes a structured clinical questionnaire and submits their information, and a licensed provider reviews it later and makes a decision, rather than meeting the patient live in the moment. The data is captured and forwarded to the provider, hence store and forward. It is efficient and it scales, which is exactly why the safety logic cannot depend on a human being present. The questions, the order, and what stops the flow have to do the first pass of work on their own, and then hand a clean record to the provider who makes the actual clinical call.
What is a hard-stop contraindication in a GLP-1 intake?
A hard stop is an answer that ends the standard flow immediately rather than routing to review, because the clinical protocol treats it as an absolute reason not to proceed. For GLP-1 medications the clearest examples come from the prescribing information, which carries a boxed warning for thyroid C-cell tumors and lists a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or the MEN 2 syndrome, and known hypersensitivity to the medication, as contraindications. Current pregnancy is another common stop. Your medical director defines the list; the intake's job is to make sure those answers stop the flow before a payment or a prescription, every time.
Should the intake take payment before or after the eligibility check?
After the hard-stop and eligibility logic has run, as a rule. Taking a card and then declining the patient because of an answer they already gave creates refunds, chargebacks, support load, and a bad experience, and it is hard to defend taking payment for care you were never going to provide. The cleaner pattern runs the disqualifying questions first, so a patient who hits an absolute contraindication never reaches checkout, and payment happens once the person is plausibly eligible and on their way to a provider's review.
Who decides the contraindications and thresholds, the agency or the clinic?
The clinic. The contraindications, the BMI thresholds, what hard stops and what routes to review, and how edge cases are handled are clinical decisions that belong to the medical director and the provider team, informed by the prescribing information and the standard of care. A web agency does not set medical criteria. What the agency builds is the system that executes those rules reliably, in the right order, at the right moment, and records what happened so the provider and a future auditor can both follow it.
How does good intake architecture help with medical board or LegitScript scrutiny?
Because both are really asking the same thing: was there a legitimate clinical evaluation behind the prescription. An intake that captures structured answers, stops the clearly disqualified, routes the ambiguous to a real provider, records the provider's decision, and never auto-prescribes is the evidence that a genuine evaluation happened. A flow that waves everyone through to a payment and a prescription is the opposite, and it is the pattern that draws scrutiny from a medical board, from LegitScript, and from a payment processor reading the funnel.
Sources
- WEGOVY (semaglutide) injection, full prescribing information, including the boxed warning and contraindications, U.S. FDA checked 2026-10-07
- WEGOVY prescribing information, Novo Nordisk checked 2026-10-07
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