Yes, that is one way to get the first line of output from a command.
If the command outputs anything to standard error that you would like to capture in the same manner, you need to redirect the standard error of the command to the standard output stream:
utility 2>&1 | head -n 1
There are many other ways to capture the first line too, including sed 1q (quit after first line), sed -n 1p (only print first line, but read everything), awk 'FNR == 1' (only print first line, but again, read everything) etc.