Websites for Medical Practices and Clinics in Greece: Booking, Trust and What the Rules Allow

A website for a medical practice or clinic in Greece should do three things well: tell patients plainly who you are and what you treat, make it easy to book or request an appointment from a phone, and handle personal data with the care health information requires. It also has to stay within professional rules. For doctors, the Code of Medical Ethics (Law 3418/2005) explicitly allows a practice website, but expects it to be accurate, objective and informative rather than promotional: no testimonials, no claims of treatment successes, no comparisons with colleagues, and a visible date of the last update. Within those limits, a clear, fast, bilingual site with real bios, hours, a map and a simple booking route earns more trust than any slogan.

This guide is for doctors’ practices, dentists, physiotherapists and specialist clinics in Greece: a cardiologist in Katerini, a dental practice in Paralia, a physiotherapy centre in Litochoro. Their patients are often worried, comparing two or three names, or booking for an elderly parent. They read carefully, and leave fast when something feels off.

What the rules allow on a doctor’s website

The starting point for doctors is the Code of Medical Ethics, Law 3418/2005. Article 17 prohibits “any personal advertising or systematic public presence or mention of the doctor’s name, directly or indirectly”. Article 18 then allows a website explicitly: doctors may keep a website that states, in particular, the details listed in Article 17(3). Those are the same details allowed on the practice sign: name and surname, registration number with the local Medical Association, permanent titles recognised in Greece, specialty, and the days and hours of consultation.

Article 18 adds four practical requirements:

• The site name and email address must be consistent with professional decorum and match the services actually provided. A domain with your name and specialty is fine; “best-cardiologist.gr” is not.
• The site must show when it was last updated, and must mention any possible conflict of interest.
• It may include contracts or cooperation with the State, health funds and insurers, for example a contract with EOPYY.
• The information must be accurate, objective and understandable. It must never mislead the public or lead to an indirect comparative assessment of qualifications or degrees.

Article 17 also sets limits that matter for web copy. Paragraph 6 treats the publication, with the doctor’s knowledge, of thank-you or congratulatory notes and of real or hypothetical diagnostic or therapeutic successes aimed at professional advertising as a breach carrying the same sanctions. Paragraph 7 says permitted information must never abuse patients’ trust or exploit the public’s lack of medical knowledge. Paragraph 9 requires information to the public to rest exclusively on fully documented, internationally accepted evidence. In practice:

• Fine: who you are, your specialty, titles recognised in Greece, registration number, the conditions you see and treatments you offer explained plainly, how a first visit works, hours, address, contracts with EOPYY or insurers, and evidence-based patient information.
• Avoid: testimonials and thank-you letters, success rates, before-and-after galleries, “the best” or “leading”, comparisons with other doctors, special offers, and anything that promises a result.

Dentists, physiotherapists and clinics

Dentists follow their own Code of Dental Ethics, Presidential Decree 39/2009. Article 23 mirrors the doctors’ rule (website allowed, last update and conflicts shown, insurance contracts optional, never misleading), while Article 21 sets a general ban on advertising and Article 39 restricts how fees are announced. In 2017 the Court of Justice of the EU held, in a Belgian dentist’s case, that a general and absolute ban on advertising dental care, including through a website, is incompatible with EU law, though professional rules may still govern content and form (CJEU, Case C-339/15). Ask your dental association how this applies; a factual, restrained site is safe ground either way.

Physiotherapists have the Code of Ethics for Physiotherapists (Ministerial Decision Γ5β/Γ.Π. 76637/2021, Government Gazette B’ 1970/2023). Article 13 allows a website that lists recognised academic titles, but bans references to patients, before-and-after photos and citing numbers of cases. Article 12 bans promoting services through discounts or offers.

Presidential Decree 84/2001, under which private medical and dental practices, polyclinics, diagnostic laboratories and physical medicine and rehabilitation centres are licensed, adds a rule of its own: Article 15(1) prohibits these private primary care providers from advertising and promoting themselves in any way. It sits alongside the professional codes, including the Code’s express permission for a website, so keep the site factual. If you run a polyclinic or diagnostic centre, have the wording of the site checked before launch.

Finally, Presidential Decree 131/2003, which transposes the EU e-Commerce Directive, requires members of regulated professions to show the professional body they are registered with, their professional title and the Member State that granted it, and a reference to the professional rules that apply and how to access them. A short “Professional information” block in the footer covers it.

What patients look for before they call

Patients choosing a practice want, roughly in this order:

1. Who you are: name, photo, specialty, titles, where you trained and work. A real person, not a stock image of a stethoscope.
2. Whether you treat their problem: services explained in plain words, “knee pain after running” as well as “arthroscopy”.
3. How to book: phone, form or online calendar, and what happens next.
4. Where and when: address, a map link, floor and lift, parking, and hours that match Google.
5. Who pays: whether you have an EOPYY contract or work with private insurers, and, if you choose, your consultation fee.

On prices: the Code of Medical Ethics does not list fees among the website contents, and many doctors leave them off. If you publish them, keep them factual and current, never framed as a deal; dentists and physiotherapists should check their own codes first. Private clinics in the legal sense, the inpatient clinics licensed under Law 4600/2019, are a separate case: Article 25(6) requires them to publish a price list of their services and products on their website, as well as at reception and in the accounts office.

A page per service, or per group of conditions, helps patients and search engines more than one long list. On each page: what it is, who it is for, what to expect at the first visit, how long it takes and how to book. Write it yourself, or at least approve it.

Online appointments: request form, real-time booking or a platform

In most practices the secretary’s phone is the bottleneck: it rings during consultations, and nobody answers at 22:00 when a patient finally has time to book. The common options:

In Greece one of the best-known private platforms is doctoranytime, where patients search for doctors and health professionals, read ratings and book; its site says it lists around 10,000 doctors and health professionals. For EOPYY-contracted doctors there is also a public route: in January 2025 the Ministry of Health presented finddoctors.gov.gr, a central platform covering public health facilities and about 3,500 EOPYY-contracted private specialists, where patients log in with their gov.gr credentials and AMKA (Parapolitika).

Many practices use a platform alongside their own site. Our view: your own website should still be the address you print on cards and link from Google, because you control it. Whatever you choose, the booking step should ask only for name, phone, email, preferred time and type of appointment, then send a confirmation and a reminder. Before you sign up for any tool, ask what it costs per month and per SMS reminder, where it stores data and how you export your patient list if you leave.

Patient data and GDPR: keep the website out of the medical record

Under the GDPR, data concerning health is a special category. Article 9 prohibits processing it unless an exception applies, such as explicit consent, or health care provided by or under the responsibility of a professional bound by secrecy. Recital 35 defines health data broadly: it includes information collected when someone registers for health services, and any information about a disease, medical history or treatment. So even an appointment request for a named specialty can say something about a person’s health.

The practical conclusion is that the website should collect as little as possible, and nothing clinical:

• Forms: name, phone, email, preferred day and type of appointment. No free-text “describe your symptoms” box, no medical history, no uploads of test results.
• Say it on the form: “Please do not send medical information here. We will discuss it at your appointment.”
• Hosting: keep the site and form data in the EU, use HTTPS, and delete submissions once they are in your practice system.
• Processor agreements: Article 28 requires processing on your behalf to be governed by a contract. Sign one with your host, form or email service and booking tool.
• Cookies: ask for consent before analytics or embedded content that sets cookies. The Hellenic Data Protection Authority’s guidance says cases of cookies not requiring consent are very limited, and that rejecting should take the same number of actions as accepting.
• Advertising pixels: keep ad-platform tracking off appointment and condition pages; it can tell a third party who looked at what.
• Privacy notice: who is responsible, what you collect, why, for how long, and how patients exercise their rights.

Trust: real doctors, real bios, careful content

Health is what Google calls a “Your Money or Your Life” topic. In its guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google says its systems give more weight to signals of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) for topics that could significantly affect people’s health, and that “of these aspects, trust is most important”. It also encourages accurate authorship information where readers expect it. The professional rules point the same way:

• A bio page per practitioner: photo, specialty, registration number, training, affiliations, languages spoken. Factual, no superlatives.
• Signed and dated patient information: author, reviewer and last updated date on every article. That also meets the last-update rule in Article 18.
• Sources for medical statements: link to guidelines or scientific societies, in line with the evidence requirement in Article 17(9).
• Real photos of the practice: the entrance, the waiting room, the team.
• No invented content: Google says any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy, and it names made-up names and AI-generated headshots as examples.

The same principles shaped our work on Medixplain, a healthcare AI brand whose website speaks to clinicians, partners and buyers: trust before features, plain language for a technical subject, and a restrained visual system.

Google Business Profile and structured data

Many patients meet you on Google Maps first. Google’s guidelines for representing your business treat doctors and dentists as individual practitioners:

• A public-facing practitioner who can be contacted directly at the verified location during stated hours can have their own profile. Support staff should not.
• Where several practitioners work at one location, the practice gets its own profile, and each practitioner’s profile title includes only the practitioner’s name.
• A solo practitioner who is the public face of a branded practice should share one profile with it, in the format “[brand]: [practitioner name]”.
• One profile per practitioner, not one per specialisation. Titles such as “Dr.” may be included.

Keep hours, phone and address identical on the profile and the website, including summer hours and August closures. When you reply to reviews, remember Article 13 of the Code, which requires strict confidentiality about anything a doctor learns about a patient: never confirm that a reviewer is your patient or discuss their care in public. Thank them and invite them to call the practice.

Structured data

Schema.org has specific types for health businesses under MedicalBusiness, including MedicalClinic, Physician (with the subtypes IndividualPhysician and PhysiciansOffice), Dentist and Physiotherapy. Use the most specific one, with name, address, phone, openingHoursSpecification, medicalSpecialty and, where true, isAcceptingNewPatients. Google’s local business structured data documentation explains the format. It does not guarantee any special display, but it removes ambiguity, and it should match the page and the profile exactly.

Accessibility and languages

A practice’s visitors skew older than most websites’ audiences. Use body text of at least 16px, strong contrast, large buttons, a phone number that is a tap-to-call link, forms with visible labels, and pages that still work at 200% zoom. Aim for WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and 2.2 AA for new work.

On the legal side, our article on the European Accessibility Act explains the rules. In short: microenterprises providing services (fewer than 10 staff and no more than €2m turnover or balance sheet) are exempt from the service requirements, which covers most solo practices, and a site that only informs and takes appointment requests probably falls outside the Act’s e-commerce definition. A larger clinic that sells services or takes paid bookings online should check with a lawyer.

In tourist areas, language matters too. In Paralia, Olympiaki Akti or Leptokarya, summer brings sprained ankles, ear infections and dental emergencies from visitors who do not read Greek. A full English version with its own URLs is worth it. Have a person check every medical term, since this is where machine translation fails quietly, and say which languages are spoken in the practice.

Must-have vs nice-to-have features

If you are budgeting, our guide to business website costs in Greece explains what drives the price of each item.

Practice website launch checklist

1. Each practitioner has a factual bio with specialty, recognised titles and registration number; no testimonials, success claims, before-and-after photos or offers anywhere.
2. Service pages explain each treatment plainly, with what to expect and how to book.
3. A last-updated date and any conflict of interest are visible; professional information sits in the footer.
4. Forms ask for contact details and preferred time only, with a note not to send medical information.
5. Booking or request flow tested end to end, including confirmation, reminder and cancellation.
6. Hosting in the EU, HTTPS on, processor agreements signed, privacy notice published, cookie banner with an equal reject option.
7. Hours, address and phone identical on the site and Google Business Profile, set up per Google’s practitioner rules.
8. Structured data validated with Google’s Rich Results Test.
9. Greek and English versions complete; medical terms checked by a person.
10. Accessibility basics checked: contrast, text size, keyboard use, labelled forms, 200% zoom.
11. Wording reviewed against your professional code, and with your association if in doubt.

How Orya One can help

We build websites for practices and clinics from Paralia Katerinis, and you work directly with the people building them. A site with up to five pages, a contact form, Google Maps and basic SEO starts from €400 on our Essential tier and goes live in one to two weeks. Growth, from €1,000, adds custom design, Greek and English, editing your own content, online booking, WhatsApp and analytics, in three to six weeks. Quotes are fixed and written, sites are GDPR by design, the code is yours once the project is paid in full, and a care plan for hosting, updates, backups and small edits starts from €25 a month. See our websites page.

If you already have a site, ask for a free website check: a written report on speed, phones, Google and accessibility. Or send us a short note about your practice and what is not working. We are not lawyers and will not tell you what your code allows, but we will build to the wording your association approves and tell you honestly what is worth fixing first.