How hard is it to book a specialist online in Frankfurt?

1. Frankfurt shows both gaps at once. 55 percent of sampled practices showed publicly insured patients no appointment at all, and where booking worked, the public median was 33 days against 8. No other city in this series pairs an access gap this wide with a waiting gap this deep.
2. The gap is configured, not coincidental. 15 percent of practices exclude public patients from the online first appointment outright, and 76 percent of the practices that showed public patients nothing had an open private slot at the same moment.
3. Digital access to psychotherapy is effectively absent for public patients. The platform lists 92 profiles, 24 bookable; of the 23 sampled, 21 showed no public first session. The thin supply is itself part of the finding.
4. Cardiology carries the deepest measurable wait. A public median of 46 days against 19 for private patients, counted across the minority of practices where public booking worked at all (12 of 50).
5. For English speakers, the two gaps compound. English-language care is easy to find (49 percent of profiles), but it is concentrated in exactly the fields and practices where private cover opens the door.

1. Two layers. A census of all 1,297 reachable profiles (languages, declared billing status, online bookability; 1,437 listed, 140 unreachable), and an availability sample of 323 bookable practices, roughly 50 per specialty, drawn evenly across all result pages to avoid the platform's availability-based ranking bias. Psychotherapy contributes 23, all reachable bookable practices there were.
2. Platform and insurance categories. The platform surveyed is Doctolib, Germany's largest medical booking platform. The private query corresponds to the platform's own category for privately insured patients; self-paying patients use the same channel. Both queries per practice ran immediately one after the other on the snapshot day.
3. Digital access only. Public patients can still obtain appointments by phone, via their GP, or through the 116117 appointment service, which guarantees an appointment within four weeks with a referral code. The finding is precisely that the direct digital channel open to private patients is largely closed to public patients.
4. No referral is legally required for any of the seven specialties studied. The comparison concerns the identical referral-free first appointment for both insurance types. The platform encodes referral requirements in structured form; none of the sampled first-appointment types carried one.
5. Snapshot, not a season. Practices release slots in waves. Where booking is enabled but no slot appeared, quota policy and genuine fullness cannot be fully separated from one day of data; the open private calendars at the same practices point to quota policy. The study repeats quarterly.
6. Billing status is declared by 59 percent of profiles; private-only shares are reported against the declared base and labelled as such. English listing is the practice's own declaration.
7. Medians are counted across bookable practices only and rounded to whole days; waits beyond the 98-day scan come from the platform's own next-appointment field. Where calendars are shared between insurance types, both patients see identical dates, and such practices are counted as offering equal access.

Funding and conflict of interest. TheGoodBroker advises on private health insurance and may receive commission from an insurer when a policy is concluded. This study was not funded or influenced by any insurer. Method and aggregate results are published for independent review. The study measures booking availability; it makes no statement on whether private health insurance is the better choice for any individual.