The HIT-6 addresses six main domains affected by headaches, including pain, social functioning, role functioning, cognitive functioning, vitality, and psychological stress. This survey is extremely useful for screening and monitoring how headaches affect patients in their day-to-day lives over time. Users can more easily identify appropriate care measures, particularly for patients who have been underdiagnosed and undertreated for debilitating headaches in the past.

For clinical purposes, the HIT-6 provides a validated screening cut point score for migraine headaches, cut point scores to stratify individuals by headache impact severity, and clinically meaningful thresholds of score changes to evaluate improvement or deterioration in headache impact.