Surgical ConsultingWhat a patient-education website includes — running live on this page.
Most agencies describe features. These are the working parts of an RC Surgical Consulting build, embedded here so you can hover them, tap them, and scan them with your own phone before you spend anything.
What is a hover glossary?
Clinical language is the reason patients stop reading. Defined terms are underlined in the body text. Hover one on a desktop, or tap it on a phone, and the definition appears without leaving the page or losing your place.
Your gallbladder sits under the liver and stores bile. When a stone blocks the duct, the gallbladder becomes inflamed, and we call that cholecystitis. If a stone escapes into the main duct instead, it is choledocholithiasis, and it usually needs to come out before or after the operation.
The operation itself is a cholecystectomy. Most are done laparoscopically or robotically through four small incisions. Occasionally the anatomy is difficult to discern and the safest finish is a subtotal cholecystectomy, which leaves a small cuff of gallbladder behind on purpose.
Definitions are one or two sentences, written for a frightened person reading on a phone. Each term is limited to two appearances per page so the text never turns blue.
- Written in the physician’s voice, not lifted from a medical dictionary.
- Every term also lives on a searchable glossary page, which is its own entry point from Google.
- Never wraps a term inside a link, a button or a heading, so nothing breaks.
Interactive patient tools that route, and never diagnose
A patient who can click through to their own situation reads more, calls sooner, and arrives at the visit with better questions. Every path ends at a page to read, a phone number to call, or the emergency department. No path ends in “you are probably fine.”
The demo below is one worked example, built for gallbladder disease. Your tool is built from your conditions, your thresholds and your red flags. A breast practice routes on a new lump and a pathology result; a plastic surgery practice routes on procedure choice and recovery stage; a spine practice routes on weakness and bowel or bladder change. The engine is the same; the questions are yours.
What brings you here today?
Is the pain constant, or do you have fever or yellowing of the eyes or skin?
How far out is it?
Which decision?
Where would you like to start?
Do not wait. Call your doctor now, or go to the emergency department.
Yellowing of the eyes or skin is jaundice. With constant pain or fever it can mean a blocked or infected bile duct, and that needs to be seen the same day rather than read about. On a real site this result carries the practice’s phone number, the after-hours number, and a direct instruction to go to the emergency department.
This is the branch that justifies the whole tool. A routing tool that sends a jaundiced patient to a reading page has done harm, so the urgent branches are written by the physician and reviewed before launch.
Two pages will help.
Pain that comes and goes routes to the condition guide and to the page on what the first appointment covers. Three or four links, never more — beyond that the tool has just rebuilt the navigation.
Straight to the surgery pages.
Before surgery, day of surgery, and the recovery timeline, in that order, with the printable handout at the top rather than buried at the bottom.
A comparison table.
Rows are the questions patients ask in their own words: what does it involve, how long is recovery, what are the risks, who is it best for, what does it not fix. Where the physician has a preference, it is stated underneath in their voice.
The condition library.
No urgency, no pressure, and no capture form standing between a curious visitor and the thing they came to read.
- Three questions maximum. Longer and people abandon.
- Any urgent branch routes to a clinician, with the phone number in the result.
- The searches people type into the FAQ filter are the most useful thing on the whole site: they tell you what is missing.
The exam-room flyer and its tracked QR code
A single sheet for the exam room wall, the check-out desk and the discharge folder, carrying a QR code that lands on the right page. It is the cheapest thing in the whole build and it is the bridge between the fifteen minutes you have and the two weeks the patient has.
Scan it. It opens DrCRodriguez.com and tags the visit as coming from an exam-room flyer.
Why the tag matters
The code does not point at the bare address. It carries a source tag, so every scan is separated from every other kind of visit in your analytics. You stop guessing whether the flyer works.
Which means you can tell whether the paper works. Scans arrive in your analytics as their own source, sitting alongside Google and direct, rather than disappearing into untagged traffic. You stop guessing whether the sheet on the wall is doing anything.
What is on the sheet
- The practice name, the condition, and one line of what the page covers
- The QR, sized to scan from arm’s length
- The short web address printed underneath, for the patient whose camera will not cooperate
- The office phone number
Printed as a PDF you own. Reprint it, change it, put it on your own letterhead.
Handoff: your whole site on your phone, one QR at a time
Handoff is a small app that installs on the phone in your coat pocket. Open it, pick the page this patient needs, and hold the screen up. They scan it and walk out with the page already open. No email address, no portal login, no printer.
drvasques.com/uterine-cancer
- It installs to the home screen and opens like any other app, offline.
- It is the physician’s own site, so the patient reads the words their surgeon wrote, not a pharmaceutical brochure.
- Every code is tagged, so Handoff scans show up as their own source in analytics.
- It also carries the non-page codes: call the office, a contact card, directions, and a link to leave a Google review.
Open the real Handoff app for DrCRodriguez.com ↗ — it is built to be used on a phone, so it will look large on a desktop screen.
Website analytics that answer a physician’s real questions
Not a wall of charts. Four questions: how are people getting here, what are they reading, how long do they stay, and which of the things we built is earning its place. Here is the real answer for DrCRodriguez.com, covering the 93 days since analytics was installed on that site — June 18 to September 19, 2026.
How they got there
| Source | Visits | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Direct — typed, saved, or scanned | 771 | 68.7% |
| Google search | 241 | 21.5% |
| DuckDuckGo search | 20 | 1.8% |
| 20 | 1.8% | |
| 18 | 1.6% | |
| 12 | 1.1% | |
| Bing search | 11 | 1.0% |
| ChatGPT | 9 | 0.8% |
The highlighted row is the one to watch. People are arriving from an AI assistant, which is a channel that did not exist for physician practices three years ago.
What they read
| Page | Views |
|---|---|
| Homepage | 841 |
| Gallbladder condition guide | 178 |
| Blog index | 135 |
| Inguinal hernia guide | 121 |
| The teaching deck | 110 |
| Recovery & getting back to life | 58 |
| Waiting-room games | 53 |
| About the surgeon | 34 |
Only four pages were read more than the exam-room teaching deck: the homepage, the gallbladder guide, the blog index and the inguinal hernia guide. GA4 reports page titles rather than addresses, so a page whose title was edited mid-period appears as two rows; the homepage and the gallbladder guide are combined here.
of located visitors were in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro — 348 of 710, spread across 228 cities in total. For a practice, that is the number that matters: a patient-education site reaching the patients who can come to your clinic.
recorded actions per page view. GA4 logged 9,557 events against 2,442 views. A page that loads and is abandoned produces one or two. Nearly four means people are scrolling, staying past ten seconds and clicking — which is what the 111 seconds is made of.
- The property is created in your name, on your Google account. You keep it whatever happens to us.
- A plain-language summary comes with each care plan, saying what changed and what to do about it.
- Search Console is set up alongside it, because it holds about 16 months and drops the oldest continuously. Nobody captures it retroactively.
- Every number on this page came from a single GA4 export covering June 18 to September 19, 2026 — every day since analytics went on that site. We did not pick a flattering window.
Questions physicians ask about these features
Do these features cost extra?
No. The hover glossary, the patient routing tools, the searchable FAQ, the exam-room flyer, the Handoff app and the analytics setup are all part of a Complete Patient-Education Site. Patient teaching decks are priced separately, at $1,500 to set up, because they are built against your own condition pages and need those pages to exist first.
Who writes the glossary definitions?
We draft them from your existing materials and your interview answers, and you verify every one before it publishes. A definition is one or two plain sentences, written for a frightened person reading on a phone, in the words you would use across the desk. Nothing is lifted from a medical dictionary.
Can a patient tool give a diagnosis?
No, and that is deliberate. Every branch of every routing tool ends at a page to read, a phone number to call, or the emergency department. No path ends in “you are probably fine.” Any branch that could be urgent routes to a clinician, with the practice phone number in the result.
Does the Handoff app store patient information?
It holds no patient information of any kind. Handoff is a list of your own website pages and a QR code for each one. There is no field in it that can take a name, a date of birth or a record number, and nothing a patient scans is written anywhere. It is a faster way to hand someone a web address.
Who owns the Google Analytics property?
You do. The property is created on your Google account, in your name, from the start. The same is true of the domain, the hosting and Search Console. If you leave, all of it stays yours, with no buyout and no export fee.
Will the QR codes still work if the site changes?
Yes, as long as the page address stays the same, and we keep addresses stable for that reason. A printed flyer has a long life on an exam room wall, so page URLs are treated as a commitment rather than an implementation detail. If a page genuinely has to move, we leave a redirect behind it.
Everything on this page is standard.
The glossary, the routing tools, the flyer, Handoff and the analytics are part of a Complete build, not upsells. Teaching decks are priced separately because they need your own condition pages to build from.