Building a medical practice website: duties and practicalities

A practice website is rarely read. It is used — usually on a phone, often in a hurry, frequently by someone in pain or checking on behalf of a parent. Plan a practice site from that situation and you build something different from someone who starts with the design. This article sets out what a website for a medical or dental practice actually has to do, and which three topics set it apart from an ordinary business website.

What patients actually open your website for

Most visits to a practice site come down to a handful of questions. Not your mission statement, not your practice philosophy, not the photo of the waiting room. These:

• When are you open — and are you open right now?
• How do I get there, and where do I leave the car?
• Are you even accepting new patients?
• How do I get an appointment, and roughly how long is the wait?
• Do you do the thing I am coming for?
• Who will treat me, and what applies outside surgery hours?

Everything else is secondary. That is not a matter of taste but a test you can run yourself: open your current site on a phone and time how long each of those six answers takes to find. Anything over ten seconds turns into a call to reception. Publishing your opening hours as an image or a PDF saves ten minutes during the build and costs you calls every month afterwards: zoom in on a phone and you get pixels, and have it read aloud and you get nothing at all.

Which leads to something that argues against our own interests: many practices need less website than they are offered. A practice with full appointment books and no growth plans does not need twenty pages, it needs four or five that are correct at all times. Size does not help here; being up to date does. A small, maintained site beats a large one still listing the holiday cover from the summer before last.

What patients look for — and where it belongs

One row in that table deserves a rule of its own. Your opening hours appear in at least three places: the website, the Google Business Profile and the door. Decide which one is the source of truth and maintain that one first. If the three disagree, the patient does not work out which is right; they ring, or they stand in front of a locked door.

Healthcare advertising is drawn more tightly than you expect

This is where a practice website differs fundamentally from, say, a builder’s. You are subject not only to general competition law but additionally to the Heilmittelwerbegesetz, the German act governing advertising for healthcare — and beyond that to the professional code of your regional medical or dental chamber. Those codes are chamber law and they differ from chamber to chamber, so what a colleague in another federal state has on their site is no evidence of what applies to you.

In practice this means that wording which would be entirely unremarkable on an ordinary business site can raise a professional or competition-law question on a practice site. We deliberately will not tell you which wording that is — it is not a web design agency’s job. What we can do is structure the copy so the passages needing review are separated from the uncontroversial ones. In our experience they cluster here:

• Any statement claiming an effect, an outcome or a duration
• Comparisons with other practices, including implicit ones such as “the most modern in …”
• Before-and-after material and treatment imagery of any kind
• Patient quotes, reviews and anything that looks like them
• Titles, additional designations and stated areas of focus — the wording itself is regulated
• Competitions, discounts, promotions and referral rewards

A second, frequently overlooked point concerns the legal notice. For regulated professions, §5 DDG requires more than a name and an address: among other things the responsible chamber, the statutory professional title and the state that conferred it, plus the applicable professional rules and a note on where they can be found. That is diligence work, not creative work — and it is the part of a practice website that a standard site-builder legal notice routinely fails to cover. Have the finished text checked before launch.

Patient data does not belong in an ordinary contact form

Health data is a special category of personal data under the GDPR and is subject to stricter conditions than an ordinary postal address. That is why the standard contact form, which is entirely unproblematic on any other company website, can be the wrong default on a practice site.

The crux is not whether a form is allowed. The crux is what people write into it. An empty box headed “your message” invites people to describe symptoms, test results and medication — and those details then sit in a database, in a mailbox, and possibly in an email attachment at a provider who should know none of it. A form can defuse that situation by never creating it:

• Few fields with a clear purpose — a callback request needs a name, a number and a time window, nothing more
• A visible line above the free-text box: no symptoms or test results here, we will discuss that by phone
• No free-text box where a choice will do — “reason: appointment / prescription / referral / other”
• Transport encryption is the floor, not the goal; what matters is where the data sits afterwards and who sees it
• A deletion routine that somebody actually carries out — not a mailbox that has kept everything for four years
• Prescription requests and results enquiries go through the route your practice already has for them, not through the website

A form with three fields gets filled in; one with twelve does not. That is true everywhere, and here it happens to coincide with the more privacy-friendly option. If you have a data protection officer, the form draft is the right moment to involve them — before the build, not after launch. Whether your practice has to appoint one is, again, a legal question.

Online booking: the data question comes before the product question

Online appointment booking is usually discussed as a product decision: which system, which interface, which link to the practice management software? For the website, that is the second question. The first is: which data leaves your practice, to whom, and on what basis? We deliberately recommend no system here and assess none — doing so would require knowing the specific contract and the specific configuration.

The point at which booking tips over into a data protection problem is rarely the booking itself. It is the extra field. A name and a time are contact details; a name, a time and a “reason for visit” menu are health information held by a third party. Understand that difference before you choose, and you will have a very different conversation with the provider afterwards.

• Which fields does the system collect — and can the unnecessary ones be switched off?
• Where is the data processed and stored, and is a data processing agreement offered?
• Who at the provider can see the entries, and how is that logged?
• How long are appointments retained, and who deletes them?
• What happens when the contract ends — export, deletion, evidence of it?
• Is the booking widget embedded via a third-party script that loads as soon as the page opens? Then it is also a question for your consent banner, not only for appointments.

And the uncomfortable counter-check: a booking system nobody maintains is worse than a phone somebody answers. If the calendar in the system drifts from the calendar in the practice, it produces double bookings, callbacks and friction at reception — exactly the work it was meant to remove. Settle who maintains it daily first; then decide whether to have one.

Accessibility counts for more here than elsewhere

On a practice website, accessibility is not a courtesy towards a minority but an adjustment to your audience. Your visitors are disproportionately older, see less well, operate a phone one-handed or use assistive technology. Regardless of which legal duty ultimately applies to you — a legal question, as above — the concrete measures are neither expensive nor laborious when they are built in from the start:

• A large base font size and sufficient contrast; light grey on white is unreadable in waiting-room light
• Do not disable zoom — the page must scale up without content disappearing
• Opening hours, address and phone number as text, never as an image and never only in a PDF
• The phone number as a tappable link, so one tap is enough
• Form fields with properly associated labels, not just placeholder text
• Operable without a mouse, in a sensible order, with a visible focus indicator
• Meaningful alternative text for images and a clean heading structure
• Large, well-spaced buttons — this is often operated with a thumb, standing up

One detail that is often missing and worth a great deal: describe the access in words rather than labelling it. “Accessible” is a claim. “Step-free entrance from the street, lift to the second floor, 90 cm door width, two parking spaces in the courtyard” is information somebody can rely on — and it saves your reception a call a week.

What to assemble before commissioning the site

Practice websites almost never slip because of the technology. They slip because of content that is supposed to get written between appointments. Having the following list together before the project starts shortens the build considerably — and gets you a site that is correct rather than one full of placeholders:

1. 01Opening hours in their final form, including telephone hours and a rule for public holidays.
2. 02Full directions: address, floor, lift, doorbell label, parking situation, nearest stops and which lines serve them.
3. 03A clear answer to “are you accepting new patients?” — and a decision on who keeps it up to date.
4. 04The routes to an appointment, separated by situation, with the times somebody actually answers the phone.
5. 05Your areas of focus in the language patients use, with every claim of an effect flagged in advance.
6. 06Details of the treating clinicians: name, qualification, professional body — and a photo session booked in, instead of stock images.
7. 07The legal notice details required for regulated professions, ready for your legal adviser to check.
8. 08The decision on online booking, including who reviews the data protection points.
9. 09All the access credentials: domain, mail accounts, existing hosting contracts, Google Business Profile.
10. 10A decision on who maintains the site after launch and how much time per month is set aside for it.

That last point determines the site’s usefulness more than any design question. A practice website ages faster than a company website, because hours, cover arrangements and holidays change constantly. Settle before the build who makes those changes and how simple it has to be, so that it takes five minutes on a Friday afternoon. We therefore build the parts that change so reception can edit them without us — and the credentials are yours in any case.

Frequently asked questions about practice websites