Your clinic’s first consultation happens without you.

The first consultation at a private clinic no longer takes place at the clinic. It takes place on a phone screen, often late at night, long after reception has closed, and in the patient’s own language, which is not always the language of your canton. Nobody from your team is there to correct a poor impression or clear up a doubt in time.

I do not need a statistic to make the case. Think about when a busy person has twenty minutes to themselves, and where they would rather think about their face, their body or their health. Rarely during office hours, and rarely in front of anyone else.

This changes what a website is for a clinic. It is no longer a brochure that accompanies the consultation. It is the first consultation, and it happens without you.

A comparison made in silence.

Someone looking for a private clinic does not compare the way they would book a flight. They open several websites in separate tabs and read them slowly, sometimes over several days. They are not looking for the lowest fee; they are trying to reduce uncertainty. They want to know who will treat them, what the process involves and what it will cost, before they expose themselves.

And they do it in silence. Calling with a question already means telling a stranger something personal, and it is only natural that many would rather wait until they have decided. They compare without leaving a trace, and a clinic that fails to convince them never even learns they were there.

For a clinic, this has an uncomfortable consequence: it loses patients it will never know it had. They do not appear in the diary or the inbox. They simply booked elsewhere.

A clinic loses patients it will never know it had.

Facts the patient can check.

In Switzerland, that comparison also has rules. The federal Medical Professions Act (MedBG) requires anyone practising a university medical profession under their own professional responsibility to advertise only in a way that is objective, meets a public need and is neither misleading nor intrusive (art. 40, letter d). Each canton designates an authority to supervise compliance (art. 41).

I read that rule as a designer, not as a lawyer, and draw a practical conclusion from it: superlatives do not work. ‘The best clinic in Zurich’ or ‘guaranteed results’ are risky phrases under the law, and they convince no one anyway, because patients know any clinic can write them. A superlative asks for faith; a fact can be checked. On a clinic’s website, the facts that persuade are few and concrete:

• Who will treat the patient: each doctor’s name, a real photograph, their speciality and where they trained.
• How the process works, step by step, from the first visit to follow-up.
• What happens at the first visit: how long it lasts and who it is with.
• What it costs, or at least what each programme includes, if the clinic prefers not to publish prices.

The MedBG itself helps with the first point. It creates a federal register of everyone who practises a university medical profession; under the law, the register serves to inform and protect patients, and most of its data is publicly available online (arts. 51 and 53). This is MedReg, run by the Federal Office of Public Health, and it records each doctor’s diploma and specialist training. A website that gives full names and titles invites patients to check them. That invitation in itself builds trust.

A superlative asks for faith. A fact can be checked.

None of this replaces review by your medical director, who should read every medical sentence before it goes live. But the design conclusion stands: the law and the patient ask for the same thing.

Whoever answers first wins.

Once the patient finally makes a move, the clock starts. In March 2011, Harvard Business Review published ‘The Short Life of Online Sales Leads’, an article on how quickly companies respond to enquiries that arrive online. According to its authors, firms that tried to make contact within the first hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried an hour later. In an audit of 2,241 companies, 23% never responded at all, and among those that replied within a month, the average response took 42 hours.

These figures need careful reading. They concern American companies across many sectors, and the article is more than fifteen years old. I would not apply them as they stand to a clinic in Geneva. I apply the direction: a patient’s interest cools in hours, not weeks, and a clinic that replies while the patient is still looking has an advantage over one that replies the next day.

At a clinic, the problem is one of structure, not willingness. Reception works by day; patients compare at night. An automatic reply promising an answer ‘during office hours’ is honest, but it sends the patient to the next tab. At eleven at night, nobody needs a doctor. What they need is a website that handles the practical side: seeing available slots, booking and receiving confirmation.

What this asks of your website.

If the first consultation happens without you, your website has to do what your best receptionist would do. I see three areas where this matters.

Languages. Patients decide in their own language. In Switzerland that means German, French, Italian or English depending on the canton, and often one more language for those who come from abroad. A poorly translated page is not a minor detail: in medicine, carelessness in the text reads as carelessness in the consulting room. Each version should be written as if it were the original, and reviewed by someone who answers for what it says.

Booking without a call. Many patients will not phone, least of all out of hours. The website should let them book a first visit by treatment, with real availability and immediate confirmation. The phone is still there for those who prefer it. An AI assistant can add another layer, answering practical questions in the patient’s language and booking directly into the clinic’s diary. It does not diagnose and does not replace the team: it clears the way to it.

Health data. Since 1 September 2023, the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP) has classed data relating to health as sensitive personal data (art. 5, letter c). A form that asks for the reason for the visit may collect exactly that. Where the patient’s consent is required to process it, the law says consent must be given explicitly (art. 6, para. 7). It also requires the controller to take data protection into account from the planning stage, and to limit processing by default to the minimum the purpose requires (art. 7).

For a designer, that last obligation is the most interesting, because the planning stage is precisely when a form is drawn. Asking only for what is needed, explaining why, hosting the data in Switzerland and knowing which third-party tools can see it are not formalities to leave for the end. They are design decisions. In a clinic, discretion is designed too.

A website that acts as a consultation.

My position is simple. A private clinic’s website in Switzerland should not be designed like a hotel’s, with sweeping photographs and vague promises. It should be designed like a well-run first consultation, one that answers who, how and how much with facts and in the patient’s language. Booking should not depend on reception hours, and data should be treated as what it is.

None of this calls for more technology. It calls for better judgement about what to say and in what order. A patient comparing clinics at midnight does not reward the most eye-catching one, but the one that lets them decide without having to ask.

Tonight at eleven, pick up your phone and search for your specialty and your city the way a patient who does not know you would. Do not type the name of your clinic. Open the first three websites that appear, yours included if it does, and give yourself five minutes to choose.

Which one would you go back to tomorrow? Why? And the least comfortable question: what would you have had to ask by phone before choosing yours?

That is the first thing I study in the Strategic Diagnostic, with your website and those of your area in front of us.