Medical & dental offices

Your patients looked you up before they called.

Almost nobody books a doctor or a dentist without looking at the website first. If yours was built a decade ago, loads slowly on a phone, and gives no way to do anything except call during business hours, that is the first impression your practice is making. This page is about fixing that, and about the reminder and intake plumbing behind it.

Where it leaks

What a dated practice site costs you

The site is the credential check. A prospective patient comparing three practices spends about a minute on each site. A cramped, dated page reads as a practice that has not updated anything in a while, fairly or not.

Every appointment costs a phone call. With no way to request a time online, all scheduling funnels through the front desk during the exact hours your staff is busiest and your patients are at their own jobs.

Reminders happen when someone remembers. If confirmation calls are a manual task on a busy day, they are the first thing that gets dropped, and the empty chair shows up two days later.

Nobody answers the after-hours question. "Do you take my insurance," "where do I park," "what do I bring" get asked at 9pm. Unanswered, the patient calls the next practice on the list.

What you get

Built for a practice, not a template with a stethoscope stock photo

Module 01

The site

A site that answers what a prospective patient actually wants to know before they pick up the phone.

Services, provider bios, and credentials laid out so a patient can scan them
Insurance and payment questions answered on the page, not by phone
New-patient forms and directions where a first-timer will actually look
Fast on a phone, which is where most people check you
An appointment request form routed wherever your front desk wants it

Module 02

The automation

The follow-up that keeps chairs full, configured once and then left alone.

Appointment reminders sent automatically, so nobody has to remember
A chatbot that answers hours, insurance, location, and prep questions after close
Review requests sent after a visit instead of hoping patients think of it
Missed-call text-back so a call during a procedure still gets a reply
Hosting and content updates included, so the site does not go stale again

On texting patients: the two rules that actually apply

Practices are often told that texting patients is a compliance minefield, usually by someone selling a product. The real position is narrower than the scare stories and worth knowing before you configure anything. This is a plain summary of two federal sources, not legal advice, and your compliance officer or counsel is the one who signs off.

HIPAA does not require patient authorization for an appointment reminder. The Department of Health and Human Services has answered this directly: "appointment reminders are considered part of treatment of an individual and, therefore, can be made without an authorization." That is HHS guidance, not a vendor's interpretation.

The FCC's rules are where the real conditions live. Federal telecom rules carry a specific carve-out for health care providers contacting a patient's wireless number, and it comes with conditions attached. Messages have to go only to the number the patient gave you, have to identify the practice, cannot contain any marketing or billing content, and are capped at 160 characters for a text or about a minute for a voice call. A provider may send one message per day per patient, up to three per week combined. Every message needs an easy opt-out, replying STOP for texts, and opt-outs have to be honored immediately.

The part almost everyone gets wrong: that three-per-week cap is not a blanket federal limit on talking to your patients. It is a condition of the safe harbor that lets you reach a wireless number without prior express consent. It is widely repeated as a flat rule, and it is not one. The distinction matters, because it changes how a reminder sequence should be built and what you need to have on file.

None of this is complicated to comply with once someone has actually read it. It is mostly a matter of configuring the reminders correctly the first time, which is the part I would handle.

The wider question, whether any of this puts protected health information in front of a vendor, has its own page: how patient data is handled, including where the chatbot sends messages, what a Business Associate Agreement would actually cost, and why "HIPAA compliant website" is not a real certification.

Sources

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Craftvane is new and I would rather show you a build than a client list. See the work and judge for yourself.

Questions a practice manager asks

Can you work with our practice management software?

The site does not replace your PM system and should not try to. It hands off to it. If your system has a booking link or an online form, the site points at it. If the reminders need to fire from your PM system rather than mine, they should, and I will say so rather than sell you a second thing that does the same job.

Do we need a business associate agreement with you?

If any system I set up stores or transmits protected health information, then yes, and I will sign one. Plenty of what a practice site does, including hours, services, directions, and provider bios, involves no PHI at all. We scope which is which before anything is built, rather than after.

Our current site was built by a company that no longer answers email. Can you take it over?

That is a common starting point and it is fine. What matters is who controls the domain name, since that is the piece that is genuinely painful to recover. Bring me your domain registrar login or the email address it is registered to and we can work out the rest.

How long does the build take?

Most of the calendar time is waiting on content from your side: bios, photos, the insurance list. The build itself is not the bottleneck. I will tell you exactly what I need at the start so it can be gathered in one pass rather than five emails.

Is this HIPAA compliant?

"HIPAA compliant" is not a certification a website can hold, and any vendor who tells you their product is HIPAA certified is overselling. What is real: build it so PHI is not collected where it does not need to be, sign a BAA where one is required, and configure patient messaging within the rules above. That is what I do, and your compliance officer reviews it.

Where: San Jose and across Santa Clara County. San Jose · Santa Clara · Sunnyvale · Campbell · Los Gatos · Milpitas · Mountain View.

Worth reading

The guarantee

You don't pay the balance until you approve the site.

Hiring one person to build your website carries an obvious risk: you pay, and what shows up is not what you had in mind. So the money is structured so that cannot happen. A deposit starts the work. The balance is due only after you have seen the finished site and told me it's right. If you look at it and it is not what we agreed, I fix it, and you still have not paid the balance.

No annual contract on the build. The retainer, if you take it, is month to month, and cancelling it does not cost you the website. The site is yours once it is paid for, either way.

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