Building software around sensitive information
Know where health information flows before writing code
We start every health project with a data map: which fields count as sensitive, where each one is entered, stored, emailed and displayed, and which outside services ever touch it. A typical practice site turns out to send intake answers through a form plugin, an email service, a calendar and sometimes a marketing tool. The map lets you decide what is acceptable. Then we close the paths that are not: notifications that say "a new form is waiting" instead of quoting the answers, calendars that show a client reference instead of a reason for visit, and exports limited to named staff.
Privacy requirements are yours to name and ours to implement
The rules depend on your country, your profession and whether you bill insurers. A US practice may fall under HIPAA. A European one works under GDPR and its special treatment of health data. We are not a compliance auditor and we do not advertise compliance with any of these. What we do is take the requirements you or your adviser set out and treat them as acceptance criteria: hosting and vendors that will sign the agreements you need, encryption in transit and at rest, access logging, automatic logout, retention periods, and a written record of how each point was met and tested.
Tracking scripts are the quiet risk
Advertising pixels, session recorders and chat widgets are easy to paste into a site header, and they report page addresses and form interactions to third parties. On a page called "book a trauma counseling session", that is a disclosure. We separate marketing pages from booking, intake and account pages, load third-party scripts only on the former, and give you a consent tool that really does block scripts until a visitor agrees.
Link to clinical systems, do not copy them
If you already run a practice management or records system, it should remain the home of clinical notes. The website handles the front door: discovery, booking, intake, payment and education. Where your system has an API, or supports a standard such as HL7 FHIR, we pass appointments and forms across. Where it does not, we embed or link its own booking screen and keep the handoff clean. Rebuilding a records system inside WordPress is a path we advise against.
Calm, accessible design
People arrive worried, in pain or on behalf of someone else. Large tap targets, plain wording, short forms that save progress and good contrast matter more here than animation. When you ask for WCAG 2.2 AA, we design and test to it, including with a screen reader and with the keyboard alone. Our UI/UX design team leads that part.