Does Section 504 apply to my practice?
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act reaches providers who receive federal financial assistance. Medicaid participation has counted for a long time. The change that surprised a lot of small practices is that Medicare Part B alone now counts, effective May 6 2025, reversing HHS’s longstanding position.
If your practice is cash-pay only, with no Medicare and no Medicaid, the rule does not reach you. We would rather tell you that than sell you a deadline you don’t have.
What are the deadlines?
May 11 2027 if you have 15 or more employees. May 10 2028 if you have fewer than 15. The threshold counts employees, not patients, not locations, not revenue.
Isn’t the deadline April 2027?
That is a different rule for different people. April 26 2027 is the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II deadline, and Title II applies to state and local government entities. If you are a private practice, your date is the HHS Section 504 date in May.
What happens after the deadline?
The deadline is when the obligation becomes enforceable, not when it ends. From that day on your website has to keep meeting WCAG 2.1 AA, and every change afterward, a new provider, a new page, an uploaded PDF, can quietly break that.
The documentation has an ongoing life too. The accessibility statement has to stay accurate, the feedback channel has to keep reaching a real person, and a remediation log only means something if it is maintained.
That ongoing work is what the $160 a month actually buys: a site still meeting the standard a year after the deadline, not just on it.
Can you make my practice compliant?
No, and neither can anyone else selling you a website. Be skeptical of a vendor who says otherwise.
Here is what we actually do: we build your website to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard the rule names, and we ship the documentation that goes with it. That is the website portion, done properly and on the record. Whether your organization is compliant overall is a legal conclusion involving your facilities, your communications, your staff training, and more. Ask your counsel, not your web developer.
What’s in the Section 504 documentation package?
Three things regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys actually ask to see:
- A published accessibility statement describing your conformance target and known issues.
- A feedback channel that reaches a real person, so someone who hits a barrier can report it.
- A remediation log recording what was reported, what was done, and when.
Most practices have a website. Very few have the paper trail.
Do you handle protected health information?
No, deliberately. We never store, transmit, or process PHI. Intake and appointment forms route directly into whatever secure system your practice already runs, so the website itself stays outside HIPAA scope. The safest way to handle PHI on a marketing website is to not have any there.
What’s included in the $3,200 setup?
Custom design to your practice’s brand, up to 10 pages, a provider directory with credentials and languages, insurance and sliding-scale pages, location pages with Local Business schema, intake routing into your existing systems, the Section 504 documentation package, a build to WCAG 2.1 AA, and domain and hosting setup.
What does the $160/month cover?
Hosting on Cloudflare’s network, unlimited email-based updates, keeping your provider and insurance lists accurate, keeping your accessibility statement current, security monitoring, and support. No separate hosting bills, no plugin fees.
How does this compare to flux.cc on price?
Less than you might think. flux.cc, our general small-business service, starts at $2,600 for up to 5 pages. For the difference you get double the page count plus the provider directory, insurance and sliding-scale pages, location schema, intake routing, and the Section 504 documentation package.
If your practice genuinely needs a straightforward five-page site with none of that, flux.cc is the better buy, and we will point you there rather than upsell you.
How does the email update process work?
Every practice gets a dedicated email address. When something changes, you email it in plain language. A provider leaves, you add a Saturday clinic, you stop taking a plan. We make the change and push it live, usually within minutes during business hours.
Nobody at your front desk needs a login or a CMS course.
Can we see changes before they go live?
Yes, and for anything beyond a quick text fix that is the default. We make the change, send you a draft to look at, and publish once you are happy. Nothing substantive appears on your practice’s website without you seeing it first.
Routine edits are the exception by design. A phone number, a holiday closure, a corrected spelling: those go straight up and we tell you they are live. Making you approve a typo fix wastes your time rather than protecting you.
Do you do SEO?
We build the technical foundation. We do not sell ongoing campaigns, and we will tell you that up front rather than after you have signed.
What that means concretely: clean HTML structure, correct heading order, meta titles and descriptions written for each page, an XML sitemap, fast load times on static hosting, and Local Business schema on every location so each office can rank on its own rather than competing with your main address. Accessibility work helps here too, because the same semantic structure a screen reader needs is the structure a search engine reads.
If you want managed ad spend, ongoing content production, and reputation management, a healthcare marketing agency is the right buy and we are happy to say so.
Can you keep our provider directory current?
Yes, and this is where most of the ongoing work goes. Providers join, retire, close their panels, add languages, and move between locations. A directory that is six months stale sends patients to the wrong place and costs you calls.
Do I own my website?
Yes. Your content and branding are yours. If you ever leave, we hand over your files. Because sites are static HTML rather than a proprietary platform, there is nothing locking you in.
Can I cancel anytime?
Yes. No long-term contract on the monthly plan. Cancel with 30 days notice.
Can you integrate our patient portal or EHR?
We link to them prominently rather than embedding them. Embedding a third-party portal inside a marketing site tends to break accessibility, because you inherit their conformance problems, and it pulls your site toward HIPAA scope. A clean, clearly labeled handoff works better for patients and keeps the boundary where it belongs.
Can we publish patient testimonials?
Carefully, if you want them. Healthcare testimonials raise consent questions, and behavioral health testimonials must avoid implying treatment outcomes. We have a workflow for collecting them ethically, and we can build a page that earns trust without any.
What platform do you use?
Astro, a modern static site generator, deployed to Cloudflare Pages. No database, no WordPress, no plugins. Faster load times and far less to attack.
What if my question isn’t here?
Get in touch. We are happy to answer anything, including whether the rule applies to you at all, before you commit to anything.