Anyone looking for a practice today starts online. By now 64 percent (Bitkom) of people in Germany have booked a medical appointment online at least once, and 25 percent (Bitkom) did so through the practice's own website, via a form or by email. For medical and dental practices, therapists and care services, their own site is no longer a shop window but an access route. At the same time they operate under a body of rules that other industries do not know: the German Medicinal Products Advertising Act draws boundaries around claims about treatment outcomes, the professional codes of the chambers govern which titles and focus areas may be carried, the legal notice requires entries that a trade or restaurant site may omit, and every enquiry touching on health falls into a specially protected data category. This article sorts the rules the way they actually appear when a practice site is built: from the home page through service and team pages to the contact form and the legal notice. It shows which phrasings tend to cause trouble, which entries are mandatory, why a callback form for health data is built differently from an ordinary contact form, and how consultation hours, emergency service information and accessibility influence the number of enquiries.
Key takeaways
- Outside professional circles the Medicinal Products Advertising Act rules out, among other things, promises of success, before-and-after depictions of surgical cosmetic procedures and the reproduction of testimonials about treatment success (Heilmittelwerbegesetz).
- Factual, profession-related information is permitted; touting, misleading or comparative advertising is not (Bundesärztekammer). The difference rarely lies in the topic and almost entirely in the wording.
- Specialist title, additional qualification and area of practice are three different things and have to stay visibly separate on the page, typography included.
- A practice legal notice additionally names the chamber, the professional title including the country of award, the professional regulations and the competent supervisory authority (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz).
- Enquiries with a health context are a special category of personal data and need their own legal basis, transport encryption and a narrow circle of access (GDPR).
- Consultation hours, emergency service references and accessibility decide an enquiry more often than the design does: 9.4 percent (Statistisches Bundesamt) of people in Germany have a severe disability.
Why practices live under two sets of rules
For most companies the legal review of a website ends with the legal notice, the privacy policy and competition law. Health professions add a second layer that applies regardless. The first layer is the Medicinal Products Advertising Act, a federal statute governing advertising for medicines, medical devices and treatments, and it distinguishes between professional circles and the general public. A practice site naturally addresses the public, so the stricter part applies. The second layer are the professional codes of the chambers. They are state law but largely follow the model professional code adopted by the German Medical Assembly (Bundesärztekammer). Dentists, psychotherapists, pharmacists and other health professions each have their own codes built on a comparable logic. That is precisely why we build websites for health professions and practices with a different structure than an ordinary company site.
Both layers pursue the same aim: patients should be able to make a decision about their health without being pushed in one direction by advertising. That is why the dividing line runs in the same place in both sets of rules. Factual, profession-related information about one's own work is expressly permitted and even welcome; touting, misleading or comparative advertising is prohibited (Bundesärztekammer). In practice that means you may describe at length which services you offer, what a procedure looks like, which equipment is in the building and who works in the team. You may not claim that a treatment reliably works, that you work better than others or that a certain result will occur. Once that line has been internalised, most of a practice site no longer needs an individual legal review.
Advertising is not the same as information
What the Advertising Act rules out
Two provisions of the Medicinal Products Advertising Act are regularly touched on a practice site. Section 3 prohibits misleading advertising and expressly names the case where a treatment is credited with an effect it does not have, or where the impression arises that success can be expected with certainty (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). Section 11 then lists individual forms of advertising that are impermissible outside professional circles (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). That list is not room for interpretation, it is a catalogue. Anyone planning a practice site is well advised to go through it point by point once and match it against the planned content before texts are written and photos commissioned. It costs an hour and saves rebuilding whole pages later.
Three items from that catalogue hit practice sites particularly often. The first are statements by third parties about treatment success, that is letters of thanks, appreciation or recommendation from patients (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). A review star on an external portal is a different matter from a quotation printed on your own site describing a cure; how to build up feedback credibly and without incentives is covered in our article on a strategy for online reviews. The second item are comparative pictorial depictions of the state of the body before and after a treatment, as far as surgical cosmetic procedures are concerned (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). The third item are depictions that work with the fear of an illness. All three can be worked around without the page losing substance — the content simply has to be built differently.
Promises of success
Phrasings such as "pain-free after one session" or "lasting freedom from symptoms" suggest certain success and fall under the prohibition of misleading advertising (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). Describe the method, the procedure and the realistic results including their limits instead.
Before and after
Comparative images of the state of the body are ruled out for surgical cosmetic procedures (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). Show rooms, equipment, procedures and the team: images that build trust without holding out a result.
Patient testimonials
Letters of thanks and recommendation about treatment success may not be reproduced in a misleading manner outside professional circles (Heilmittelwerbegesetz). More effective and uncritical are details on availability, waiting times and procedure.
- Statements that present a treatment outcome as certain or lasting instead of naming chances and limits
- Comparisons with other practices, including soft forms such as "gentler than usual" or "more thorough than elsewhere"
- Quotations from patients describing a cure or a marked relief of symptoms
- Before-and-after images of surgical cosmetic procedures, including as a gallery or video
- Imagery or text that builds fear of an illness in order to prompt a treatment
- Discounts, add-ons and promotional prices for treatments that make them look like merchandise (Heilmittelwerbegesetz)
Titles, focus areas and practice designations
The second large block is carrying designations. The professional codes permit stating specialist and subspecialty titles as well as additional qualifications acquired under the further-training regulations of the competent chamber (Bundesärztekammer). These designations are protected and defined conclusively in the further-training regulations. Alongside them, areas of practice may be named, meaning fields in which work is actually and not merely occasionally carried out. An area of practice is not a qualification but a statement about one's own practice. Precisely for that reason it has to match reality and be recognisable as a focus area so that it is not taken for a specialist title.
On a website the risk of confusion rarely arises in the text and usually in the layout. If a team page shows "Specialist in internal medicine" and "Focus on nutritional medicine" stacked under one name, in the same typeface, the same size and without any distinction, the visitor reads two titles of equal rank. A clean presentation separates and labels specialist title, additional qualification and area of practice visually. Academic degrees awarded abroad additionally require the country of award to be stated, at every place where the degree is carried, which includes the legal notice and the email signature. That is why we build team and service pages with fixed fields rather than free-flowing text: what belongs in which field is obvious during maintenance, and the structure stays stable for years.
Three levels that need to stay apart
The legal notice of a practice
Since May 2024 the provider identification duties no longer sit in the German Telemedia Act but in Section 5 of the German Digital Services Act; in substance they were largely carried over (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz). For regulated professions four entries are added that an ordinary company site may omit. First, the chamber the professional belongs to. Second, the statutory professional title and the state in which it was awarded. Third, the designation of the professional regulations together with a note on how they can be accessed, usually as a reference to the chamber's site. Fourth, where the activity requires authorisation, the competent supervisory authority with its address (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz). A group practice or a medical care centre adds the legal form, the authorised representatives and, where applicable, the register.
Two mistakes show up particularly often here. The first is a legal notice that mentions the professional-law entries only in general terms without naming chamber and supervisory authority specifically. The second is a legal notice that has not been touched since the site was built even though the composition, address or authorisation has changed. Neither is noticed quickly, and when it is, usually at an uncomfortable moment. How the mandatory entries are structured in general and which building blocks are now outdated is set out in our overview of legal notice requirements; for health professions the professional-law additions come on top.
- Name and address of the practice, plus legal form and authorised representatives for companies
- Telephone number and email address enabling direct communication
- Competent chamber by name with a reference to its website
- Statutory professional title and the state in which it was awarded
- Designation of the professional regulations and a note on where they can be viewed
- Competent supervisory authority with address, where the activity requires authorisation
- VAT identification number if held; many medical treatments are, however, exempt from VAT
- Person responsible for editorial content where the site carries journalistic articles
One source, one version
Health data in the contact form
A contact form on a tradesperson's site processes a name, an email address and a free-text field; the legal basis is usually legitimate interest or steps prior to a contract. On a practice site the same mask changes the moment someone writes into that free-text field what the matter is about. Data concerning the health of a natural person belongs to the special categories of personal data whose processing is prohibited in principle under Article 9(1) and only becomes lawful through one of the exceptions in paragraph 2 (GDPR). For an enquiry form that is typically explicit consent; for the subsequent treatment the exception for preventive medicine and treatment by professionals bound by secrecy applies. The general requirements for forms, consent and processing agreements are collected in our GDPR checklist for websites.
Concrete technical requirements follow from this. The transmission needs transport encryption at a current level, which Article 32 expressly names as a measure reflecting the state of the art (GDPR). Forwarding the enquiry by unencrypted email to a shared mailbox is the point where the chain breaks in many practices: the page is clean, the forwarding is not. It makes sense to deliver into a mailbox that only authorised people can access, with transport encryption along the whole path and a retention period that ends once the matter is dealt with. Added to that are the information duties under Article 13: who processes, for what purpose, on what basis, for how long and who else receives the data (GDPR). These details belong not only in the privacy policy but as a short note directly at the form.
| Aspect | General contact form | Enquiry with a health context |
|---|---|---|
| Data category | Ordinary personal data | Special category under Article 9 |
| Legal basis | Legitimate interest or pre-contractual steps | Explicit consent |
| Consent | Usually not required | Active, unambiguous, documented |
| Free-text field | Freely usable | With a note not to enter diagnoses |
| Delivery | Shared company mailbox | Mailbox with a narrow circle of access |
| Retention | Until the matter is closed | Tightly limited and documented |
| Duty of secrecy | Not affected | Section 203 Criminal Code applies as well |
The callback is part of the processing
Consultation hours, emergency service and accessibility
The practical value of a practice site is decided in three places that often come last in the draft. The first are the consultation hours. They belong on the page neither as an image nor as a PDF but as structured text, because otherwise they can neither be read aloud nor evaluated by search engines. The second is how times outside the consultation hours are handled: a visible reference to the medical on-call service and the emergency services belongs on every practice site, easy to find and without a detour through a form. The third is the question of whether someone can operate the site at all. At the end of 2025 a good 7.8 million (Statistisches Bundesamt) people with a severe disability lived in Germany, that is 9.4 percent (Statistisches Bundesamt) of the population; around a third of them are at least 75 years old (Statistisches Bundesamt). For a practice that is not a fringe group but a substantial part of the patient base.
The German Accessibility Strengthening Act, which transposes the European Accessibility Act into German law, has applied since 28 June 2025 (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz). Among other things it covers services in electronic commerce: a pure information site without a booking or ordering function usually falls outside it, whereas a site with online appointment booking often falls within. Micro-enterprises with fewer than ten employees and an annual turnover of at most two million euros are exempt in respect of services (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz), which applies to many single-handed practices. The benchmark is the harmonised European standard, which builds on the WCAG success criteria at level AA (European Commission); what follows from that in practice is set out in our article on the accessibility obligation under the BFSG. Practices that also address patients speaking other languages plan that through the structure of a multilingual website with hreflang rather than through a second page loosely attached at the end.
Hours as text
Opening hours as structured text can be read aloud, searched and carried into the business profile. Deviations such as holidays or public holidays belong visibly on the home page and not on a subpage.
Emergency service without detours
A clear reference to the on-call service and the emergency number takes load off the phone and keeps urgent cases out of the contact form. The numbers belong on every page as a clickable link.
Usable by everyone
Sufficient contrast, large tap targets, a label on every field and consistent keyboard operation make the site usable for older and impaired patients and improve the figures for everyone else along the way.
That this work pays off is shown by the development of appointment booking. The share of people who have booked a medical appointment online at least once rose within two years from 36 percent (Bitkom) in 2023 via 50 percent (Bitkom) in 2024 to 64 percent (Bitkom). Among those who book online or can imagine doing so, 84 percent (Bitkom) name independence from the practice's phone hours as the greatest advantage, and 43 percent (Bitkom) from the same group value automatic appointment reminders. Practices that serve this expectation on their own site instead of handing it to third-party portals keep the contact with the patient and the data in their own hands.
- Mark up consultation hours as text and reconcile them with the business profile at the search engine
- Link the on-call service and the emergency number visibly in the header or footer area
- Check accessibility against real criteria: contrast, focus, labelling, keyboard path
- Describe directions, parking, lift and step-free access concretely instead of hinting at them
- State openly whether the practice is taking on new patients
- Set every phone number as a telephone link so a tap on the smartphone is enough
From the rule to the finished practice site
The rules stop being an obstacle once the structure of the site reflects them from the outset. That is why practice websites are built here along fixed building blocks: a home page showing intake status, consultation hours and emergency service; service pages describing methods and procedures factually; a team page with separate fields for specialist title, additional qualification and area of practice; a tested form path from the input field into the mailbox; a legal notice carrying the professional-law entries. Local visibility comes on top, because a practice is searched for almost exclusively within its own catchment area: local SEO and a well-kept business profile typically bring more enquiries than one more subpage.
The whole thing runs as a fixed-price project with a named contact, from the structure through the accessible implementation under the BFSG to ongoing maintenance; what it costs is stated openly in the price overview. If an existing practice site is to change provider, the same care applies as with any move of website and email without downtime — although for a practice an interruption in reachability weighs considerably more heavily than for a retail shop. What remains at the end is a site that stands up to the rules and still brings appointments: the one does not rule out the other, it merely presupposes a clean structure.
Sources and Studies