Clinic and healthcare practice websites

The new-patient question

Everything on a clinic site should be evaluated against one question: does this help a new patient book? The answers that matter are mundane and are usually missing — are you accepting new patients, what does the first visit cost, do you direct bill, where do I park, and how soon can I get in.

"Accepting new patients: yes" in plain text, kept current, converts better than any amount of design. If you are not accepting, say that too; it saves everyone a phone call.

Billing and coverage, up front

In Canada the question underneath most clinic enquiries is money. Do you direct bill to insurers, which ones, what is covered provincially and what is not. A clear page on this prevents the most common frustrating phone call in the category, and it is the kind of concrete question AI assistants are now being asked on patients' behalf.

Booking and intake are two separate things

Booking picks a time. Intake collects history. Combining them into one long form before anybody has committed to anything kills conversions — a fifteen-field medical history is a lot to ask of someone who has not met you.

Book first with the minimum needed, then send the intake form afterwards, ahead of the appointment. You get the same completed paperwork and substantially more bookings.

Health information raises the bar on privacy

An intake form carrying health details is not an ordinary contact form. It needs encryption in transit, appropriate storage, access limited to people who need it, a retention period, and — if you are in a regulated setting — a record of consent with a timestamp.

Two practical rules worth stating plainly. First, health information should not be emailed around in plain text, which is what most off-the-shelf form plugins do by default. Second, if you record calls, you need consent for that specifically; a general privacy policy does not cover it, and a recorded call with a patient is health information.

Accessibility is not optional here

Your patients include people with low vision, limited dexterity, and older devices. Readable type, real contrast, forms that work with a keyboard, and text that a screen reader can actually read. In a healthcare context this is both a legal exposure and the entire point.

Nothing matters more than whether you are accepting patients

It is worth restating, because clinics get this wrong more than any other sector: the single most valuable sentence on a clinic website is whether you are taking new patients, and it needs to be visible without scrolling. If you are not, say that too, and say when you expect to reassess.

Clinics resist this because the answer changes. That is exactly why it has to be editable in seconds by reception rather than by a developer. A stale "accepting new patients" banner produces angry phone calls and a stale "not accepting" one turns away the patients you wanted. Either way the cost lands on the same front desk.

Practitioner pages carry the search traffic

Patients search for people. They arrive with a name from a referral, an insurance directory or a friend, and they want to confirm the person is real, still practising and still at that address. A clinic site with one combined team page loses every one of those searches to a directory listing.

Give each practitioner a page with their credentials, their registration, their focus, their languages, and whether they are personally accepting patients. Languages in particular are under-served and heavily searched — a practitioner who works in French, Arabic or Mandarin is exactly what somebody is typing, and it will not be found if it only exists on a PDF.

What to do about the forms

Most clinics have a stack of intake, consent and history forms, and the tempting move is to put them online as downloadable PDFs. That is a modest improvement over paper and it creates a new problem: patients start emailing completed health forms back, which puts personal health information into ordinary email where it should never be.

If you collect health information through the website, it has to be over an encrypted connection, stored somewhere access-controlled, retained for a defined period and deleted on schedule. If you are not ready for that, it is genuinely safer to keep forms on paper and have the site say so. The wrong answer is a download link and an email address.

Know which privacy law you are under

Health information in Canada is governed provincially as well as federally, and the rules are not identical. New Brunswick clinics fall under PHIPAA; Ontario has PHIPA; other provinces have their own, with PIPEDA sitting underneath for commercial activity. They differ on consent, on breach notification and on how long records must be kept.

For a website the practical questions are narrow: what personal health information does the site collect, where is it stored, who can reach it, and how long is it kept. Answer those four before launch rather than after, and write the answers down. This is also the part where "the developer handled it" is not a defence — the obligation sits with the custodian, which is you.

Write the practical details nobody thinks to publish

A meaningful share of pre-appointment phone calls are about logistics, not medicine. Where do I park. Is there an elevator. Which door. Do you have evening hours. What do I bring. Can I bring my child. Every one of those is a page you can write once and never touch again.

They are also the questions voice assistants and AI search get asked most often about a clinic, and they can only be answered from text that exists somewhere. Publishing them is the cheapest call deflection available to a clinic, and unlike a booking system it requires no software and no training.

What it costs

Builds start at $99 one time (20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images, 2 hours of work) plus $10 CAD per month hosting. Past the allotment: $0.20 per 1,000 characters, $2 per extra image, $40 per hour. If you would rather build it yourself, maple.website is $50 one time.

See also Excel Care Pharmacy — a working pharmacy and medical clinic where the phone system was the bottleneck, not the website.

Tell us what the business does and what it has to accomplish. We will tell you honestly if a cheaper option fits you better.