Medical Practice Website Basics and Cautions

A medical practice website needs to help a patient find the right provider, confirm you take their insurance, and book or ask a question without friction, and it needs to handle patient information carefully. The design is the easy part. The cautions are in what the site collects and what third-party tools quietly send out. Plan those with your compliance advisor before launch.

This is general information about web design, not legal or medical advice and not a HIPAA compliance review. Rules differ by practice type, state and funding. Talk to your compliance officer or healthcare counsel about your obligations.

What patients look for

• Who you are and what you treat. Providers with photos, credentials, specialties and languages spoken. A page per service or condition you treat, in plain language.
• Insurance and costs. The plans you accept, how to check, and what self-pay patients should expect, stated as accurately as you can.
• Location and access. Address, parking, public transit, hours, and accessibility of the building.
• How to book. A phone number that taps to call, an appointment link, and what to do after hours.
• What to do in an emergency. A short note that says to call 911 for emergencies and not to use the website.

Reviews and Google Business Profile matter here as with any local business. Google's guidelines allow individual practitioners to have their own profile when they are public-facing and reachable at the verified location. See local SEO for a Los Angeles service business.

Patient forms: where the data goes

New patient paperwork is a major reason to have a website, and also the biggest risk area.

1. 1Know where submissions go. If a form sends health details to an ordinary email inbox or to a form tool that has no agreement covering patient data, you may have a problem. Under HIPAA, covered entities generally need a business associate agreement with vendors that handle protected health information for them. Ask any form, scheduling, chat or email vendor whether they will sign one, and whether their plan includes it.
2. 2Collect the minimum. For a contact form, name, phone and a general reason are enough. Tell people not to include symptoms or sensitive details in a contact form.
3. 3Prefer a secure portal for clinical details. Intake questionnaires, insurance cards and history are better handled in your practice management or portal software than in a website form.
4. 4Say what happens next. How quickly someone will reply and how to reach you by phone.
5. 5Test it. Submit a test form every few weeks to be sure it arrives.

Tracking pixels and analytics: be cautious

Many marketing tools add tracking scripts to pages: advertising pixels, analytics, session recording, chat widgets. On a healthcare site, those can send details about what a visitor looked at to outside companies.

What we can say from public sources:

• The HHS Office for Civil Rights issued guidance on online tracking technologies for HIPAA-regulated entities in 2022 and updated it in March 2024. A federal court in Texas (American Hospital Association v. Becerra) ruled in June 2024 that OCR exceeded its authority with a part of that guidance, the position that HIPAA obligations attach when a tracker links an IP address with a visit to a public page about health conditions or providers. That portion was vacated, and HHS withdrew its appeal in August 2024.
• Reporting on the case says the guidance for login-protected pages, such as patient portals and appointment pages behind a login, was not vacated. OCR's position there is that trackers can access protected health information, so disclosure must be permitted and vendors may need a business associate agreement.
• Separately, the FTC has taken action against companies that shared health information with advertising platforms, including GoodRx and BetterHelp in 2023, under laws that do not depend on HIPAA. The FTC has also warned that even companies not covered by HIPAA must protect against impermissible disclosures of personal health information.
• State privacy and wiretapping laws are another layer, and pixel-related claims have been raised under them. Ask counsel about your state.

None of that tells you what is safe for your practice. It does tell you what to ask. List every script on your site, what it collects, who receives the data and why. Remove what you cannot justify. Keep advertising pixels off appointment, portal, form and condition-specific pages unless counsel has approved them. Ask your web designer to document what is installed.

Accessibility is part of the job

A medical site is used by people with disabilities at higher rates than most. Aim for WCAG 2.2 AA, which covers contrast, keyboard use, form labels, captions and readable text. Our accessibility basics list the quick wins.

There is also a regulatory reason to plan. HHS has a Section 504 rule that requires web content and mobile apps of recipients of HHS federal financial assistance to be accessible. In May 2026, HHS issued an interim final rule that moved the compliance dates to May 11, 2027 for recipients with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for smaller recipients, according to LeadingAge. Whether your practice is a recipient (for example through Medicare or Medicaid participation) is a question for your counsel. Dates and details can change, so check HHS.

Content cautions

• Do not make claims about outcomes or cure rates without support. Advertising of medical services is regulated federally by the FTC and by state medical boards, and testimonials have their own rules.
• Have a clinician review medical content, and show the review date.
• Do not publish patient photos or stories without written authorization that fits your obligations.
• Keep credentials, license numbers and board certifications accurate and verifiable.

Speed and mobile

Patients look things up on phones, often in a waiting room or on the way to an appointment. A fast, readable site matters. See Core Web Vitals in plain English.

Want a person to look at it?

We build medical practice sites in Los Angeles with clear provider pages, simple booking and a short list of every third-party script, so your compliance advisor can review exactly what is installed. See our work for medical practices, or start a quote and tell us how patients book and which systems you already use.