What a medical website has to do
Patients arrive with two questions a practice website almost never answers: what will this cost me, and how soon can I be seen. The sites that answer either one directly are the outliers.
Key Takeaways
What makes a medical website work?
It answers the question the patient actually typed. Most practice sites are organised around the practice, our providers, our locations, our services, while the visitor is trying to find out whether they are covered, whether they can be seen today, and whether this is the right kind of doctor for what is wrong. Five of the fourteen sites below publish a price, a membership rate, or a copay estimate; the other nine still route cost to a phone call. That is a count of these fourteen practices as their sites displayed on 2026-08-31, not a survey, and these skew toward specialty and direct-pay models whose economics differ from a hospital- owned primary care group.
Fourteen medical sites and what each one does
1. Rothman Orthopaedics: Philadelphia, PA
Indexes conditions on two parallel axes at once, browse by subspecialty, or browse a full alphabetical index of individual condition pages. Most groups pick one, which strands the patient who knows the body part but not the diagnosis, or the reverse. rothmanortho.com
2. The Steadman Clinic: Vail, CO
Publishes an actual price transparency table with CPT codes and dollar figures for common procedures, office visits, imaging, injections. Many practices have a page titled self-pay pricing; this is one of the few that puts numbers on it. thesteadmanclinic.com
3. Twin Cities Orthopedics: Edina, MN
The location directory filters down to orthopedic urgent care only, and each filtered site renders its own wait-time field. The filter is the mechanism worth copying: a patient with an acute injury should not have to read twelve location pages to find which ones take walk-ins. tcomn.com
4. OrthoCarolina: Charlotte, NC
Runs two entry paths side by side in the header, a standard appointment route and a distinct same-day walk-in route so an acute injury never enters the scheduled-appointment queue in the first place. orthocarolina.com
5. Cardiovascular Institute of the South: Houma, LA
Hands booking to a real self-scheduling integration rather than a request form, and runs a standing page for free community cardiovascular screening events, a recurring, genuinely local acquisition page type that most specialty groups do not have. cardio.com
6. Cortica: San Diego, CA
Names its first step a clinical intake visit and states up front that it is a billable consultationproducing a written care roadmap. Disclosing that the first appointment is charged, rather than dangling a free consult and surprising the family later, is the honest version of an intake offer. corticacare.com
7. Carbon Health: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
The booking entry point is a symptom search box rather than a location picker. You describe the problem first and the system routes you to a clinic and a slot, inverting the usual location, then service, then time flow that assumes the patient already knows what they need. carbonhealth.com
8. PM Pediatric Care, multi-state
Offers a pre-arrival virtual queue, enter the in-office line before you leave the house, and shows each office's hours for today with its own booking button, rather than one set of hours for the brand. pmpediatriccare.com
9. Schweiger Dermatology Group: New York, NY
Splits the provider directory by credential into separate categoriesdermatology, Mohs surgery, allergy, pathology, so a skin-cancer patient can filter directly to Mohs surgeons instead of reading bios to work out who does what. schweigerderm.com
10. Tribeca Pediatrics: New York, NY
States a hard, specific after-hours commitment, same-day sick and virtual visits until a named hour in the evening, rather than an unqualified "24/7 support". A parent at 8pm needs the cut-off time, not a reassurance. tribecapediatrics.com
11. Oula: Brooklyn, NY
Publishes its own birth outcome rates against a stated national benchmark on the homepage, and names each clinician with credentials. Publishing outcomes next to a comparison figure is rare and it is the strongest form of proof a practice can offer provided the benchmark is cited and current. oulahealth.com
12. Tia: New York, NY
Prices two membership tiers on the page and layers them on top of insurance, stating that copays and deductibles still apply. The clarity about what the membership does and does not replace is the part most direct-care sites get wrong. asktia.com
13. Talkiatry: New York, NY
Runs an interactive copay estimator keyed to your specific insurance plan, and pairs it with an honest caveat that the first visit is longer and typically costs more. The caveat is what makes the estimator credible rather than a lead magnet. talkiatry.com
14. Sollis Health: New York, NY
Publishes annual membership prices by tier alongside a stated average time to see a clinician. For a concierge model the price is the qualifying filter, and hiding it wastes both sides' time. sollishealth.com
Cost is the most-searched, least-answered question
Patients search for what a procedure costs constantly, and practice websites answer it almost never. The reason is understandable the real answer depends on plan, deductible and what is found during the visit, but "it depends" is not the same as silence, and silence sends the patient to a site that guesses on your behalf.
There are three workable versions in the set above. Steadman publishes actual self-pay prices with the procedure codes. Talkiatry estimates the copay from the patient's own plan and says plainly that the first visit differs. Tia and Sollis publish a membership rate and state what insurance still covers. Each is a different answer to the same question, and any of them beats a phone number.
Urgent and routine are two different visitors
A single "Request an Appointment" button treats a torn ACL and an annual physical as the same event. OrthoCarolina splits them in the header. Twin Cities Orthopedics lets the location finder filter to walk-in sites only. PM Pediatric Care lets a parent join the queue before leaving home.
This is the highest-value structural decision on a medical site, because the urgent visitor is the one who will otherwise call a competitor within ninety seconds. If the practice cannot staff a same-day path, the site should say so and route to where the patient should actually go , that referral earns more trust than a form that gets answered on Tuesday.
Condition libraries earn the traffic the practice page converts
Rothman's dual index is the model: a patient who knows "rotator cuff tear" and a patient who only knows "shoulder" both land somewhere useful. Schweiger's credential-split directory does the same job on the provider side, letting the reader self-route to a Mohs surgeon rather than parsing biographies.
The failure mode is a condition library that dead-ends. Every condition page should end at the specific next step, which clinician, which visit type, which diagnostic, not at a generic contact form shared with billing enquiries.
Forms carrying health information are not ordinary contact forms. Symptom detail, intake questionnaires and portal messages need handling appropriate to protected health information, and that is a decision to make with your compliance counsel before a designer picks a form vendor. We do not publish first-person compliance certifications and neither should a practice site claim a framework it has not been assessed against.
Published outcome figures have to stay true. A stale benchmark or an uncited rate is worse than none, because a patient or a regulator can check it.
Every practice above is real and currently operating. Each URL was fetched and confirmed to return that practice's own content on 2026-08-31. Prices, wait times and outcome rates are those practices' own published claims as displayed that day, not our measurements, and not endorsements. Dental practices and med spas are deliberately excluded here; they have their own breakdowns. No conversion percentages appear on this page because we have not published an A/B test on medical sites.
What we look for in a medical site audit
- Separate urgent and routine paths visible without scrolling on a phone.
- Some answer to cost, a price table, an estimator, a membership rate, or an explicit list of plans accepted.
- Scheduling that knows the visit type and writes into the practice system, not an inbox.
- Provider pages with credentials and subspecialty, filterable when the group is large.
- Condition pages that end at a specific next step.
- A missed-call path. Patients call; text-back catches the ones the front desk cannot reach.
For the build itself, web design. For the practice stack, AI automation in healthcare. If you are a dental practice rather than a medical one, the dental website design breakdown is the closer fit.