Seems that Solana Medspas site is down. I've received two emails this morning asking if they've gone out of business and this comment on a Solana discussion thread in the forums:

"Well it looks like Buckingham and company can't hurt anyone else. The website is down and they are nowhere to be found. Hey, Over It...the truth hurts. Are you sure you aren't a Solana Owner in denial or just covering your rear end? Between the University of Arizona charges, Brooks College 60 Minutes expose and firing, Health West fiasco and connections, continuing client failures, deadbeat dad website stating a failure to pay tens of thousands in child support to his ex-wife (which was the final straw on why we didn't contract with Solana), etc... Wake up everyone associated or affiliated with Buckingham. it is time you recognize him for who he is before he hurts more people."

 I don't know why the Solana Medspas site is down but it can't be a good sign. (The first time you load the page you may see a little 'Solana Medspas Logo' flicker for just a second before you're redirected to the under construction page. This is usually a sign that the ISP has suspended the account.

In many ways, aesthetic practices and med spas are like restaurants. The core of the business is customer service, and oftentimes offering the right menu can make the difference between the success or failure of the enterprise.

Just as a first class restaurant strives to create a unique menu that will distinguish it from all its competitors, you should make it your mission to offer a service menu that offers not only all the most popular med spa treatments but also the most cutting edge, innovative procedures available.  Many of the prospects you will encounter are surprisingly well informed and will be looking for a med spa that can exceed their expectations. Some of these prospects already know the results they are looking for. They will look to you and your staff to guide them to the optimal combination of services, procedures and products to help them achieve their goals. On the other hand, many of your prospects will not have a clue about the specific technologies or procedures involved -- they will simply want to know they are in good hands and will look to you to recommend the best treatments and products for them.  

You will need to decide how broad a range of services you will offer. You may decide to offer all the popular services so your med spa will appeal to a diverse, market-driven client base. Or you may decide to carve out a more specialized niche. You will need to decide your basic positioning before you formalize your menu. One of the key factors will be to find the best service mix that matches your professional expertise. If you are a dermatologist, for example, you may wish to offer a range of specialized services for treating acne. If your background is OB/GYN, you may want to develop a specialty for the treatment of leg veins. Another key factor which you may determine from your research is your best estimate of the profitability of offering a wide variety of the most popular services compared with a more specialized approach. Heavy competition in some areas has driven fees for basic services such as laser hair removal to such low levels that such services must be evaluated merely as  "loss leaders" to help build traffic for your more profitable services.

In any event, you will need to keep current with rapidly growing technology and clinical applications by attending trade shows and workshops, subscribing to industry publications, joining various associations, and opening channels of communication between your medical and spa resources. Many practitioners pondering the question of what aesthetic services to offer have come to the realization that emphasizing treatments that require a high level of skill and/or experience is perhaps the best way to differentiate your clinic from the garden variety “medical spa” offering only “basic” treatments like laser hair removal that are available on every street corner. An excerpt from the 2007 national average fee schedule published by ASAPS clearly illustrates this point: 

Cosmetic Procedures        National Average Fee

 
Abdominoplasty     $ 5,350.00

Blepharoplasty                  2,840.00

Breast aug. (silicone)                 4,087.00

Breast aug. (saline)        3,690.00    

Facelift                   6,792.00

Hair transplantation                  5,874.00

Lipoplasty (suction)        2,920.00

Rhinoplasty                   4,357.00 

Non-Surgical Procedures      National Average Fee

Botox injection     $    380.00

Chemical peel           718.00

Fraxel          1,130.00

IPL Treatment           411.00

Noninvasive tightening       1,194.00

Injection lipolysis           905.00

Laser hair removal           387.00

Laser skin resurfacing- ablative      2,418.00

Laser skin resurfacing- non-ablative        580.00

Laser treatment leg veins          462.00

Microdermabrasion           130.00

Sclerotherapy           377.00

Collagen (Bovine)           397.00

Collagen (Human)           542.00

Hyaluronic acid (i.e., Restylane)         576.00

Sculptra         1,027.00

Srtecoll, Artefill        1,180.00 

We are looking for Clinical Providers and MedSpa Owners to help us with our Continuing Education Efforts. 

We want to provide quality content on Medical Spa MD to act as a stimulus for meaningful clinical exchange activities.

One type of Clinical Exchange is the discussions and the conversations that occur on blogs and websites.  Medical Spa MD is currently one of the only internet based clinical exchange platforms for Cosmetic Medicine.  We want to take advantage of Medical Spa MD’s leading position and large readership base to enhance its already strong presence in the Clinical Exchange field.

Our plan is to have people do summary notes of Webinars, Articles and Clinical Meetings.  These notes will be posted on Medical Spa MD and then a discussion can take place.  The conversations and debates will instruct us all!  Hopefully by sharing experiences and opinions, we will move the whole field forward in a positive and more rapid manner.

The first such Clinical Exchange Post was the summary of The IPL Dog and Lemon Guide.  This post has stimulated a lively discussion of the various IPL Systems.  Sciton and Palomar seem to be the favorite systems.  The clinical settings for treating Hair, Pigment and Vascular are being discussed.  We are all learning a great deal and a few knowledgeable and experienced thought leaders are emerging – Charry, Med Spa Guy, pmdoc, LH and SpaDocinCR.

Our second post will be a Summary of the DeepFx Round Table Webinar (May 2008) produced by Lumenis.  The Webinar was a Round Table Discussion between four of the most experienced and well known cosmetic physicians in the country – Jeffrey Dover, MD, Robert Weiss, MD, E. Victor Ross, MD and James Heinrich, MD.  Our post will summarize the Webinar.  The original Webinar is available to everyone on Lumenis’ Website.  We are hoping that our summary will prompt people to view the actual Webinar and then participate in the resulting discussion.  In the future, we hope that Lumenis will make their Webinars available in a form that can be downloaded onto iPods so we can listen in our cars.

Finally, it is our goal to get summaries done of the various meetings that are happening in the near future.  A few upcoming clinical meetings are The Cutera Clinical Forum in Chicago (August 2008), Controversies & Conversations in Laser and Cosmetic Surgery:  An Advanced Symposium in Whistler, BC Canada (August 2008) and the Harvard Conference in Boston hosted by R. Rox Anderson, MD entitled  “Laser & Aesthetic Skin Therapy:  What’s the Truth?” (October 2008).  We are hoping that conference attendees will write notes about the lectures and the sessions and then will submit those notes to Medical Spa MD to be posted.  We will be able to read these notes, learn from them and then discuss the content.  This will bring the information to countless more clinical providers.  In the future, we hope that the organizers of these conferences will record their sessions and sell the audio so we can benefit without having to travel and take time off from work.  At this years ASLMS Meeting, the lectures were recorded and you can purchase them for a nominal fee ($11 per Tape).

This Clinical Exchange Project is a grass roots activity that is meant to take the place of formal activities that Allergan and the big Laser Companies are not doing.  We are not sure why they have left this “information gap” and do not support meaningful continuing clinical education and meaningful clinical exchange, but we hope they will join our efforts once they see the value in these types of activities.  Better clinical outcomes and fewer adverse events will benefit the whole field.  By sharing information and communicating and making more information available to more providers, we can advance the field much more rapidly then our current method of each provider trying to figure things out by trial and error.

We hope you will join our effort as a summarizer of Webinars and Conferences or as an active participant in the resulting discussions and debates.

I've had a couple of phone conversations with some of the physicians who regularly post on this site and have come away with some thoughts for a series of interviews with doctors and professionals running successful medical spas. It seems that there's an insatiable desire for more information on treatments, marketing, operations, and almost everything else that goes into organizing and running a successful cosmetic practice.

I'm going to be contacting a number of clinics and physicians around the country (or outside) that run what I deem to be successful practices and interview them. I have a tentative list of questions but I'd like to enlist you, my dear readers, to help me make sure I'm not missing anything that's relevant.

So, I'm asking for some help in formulating the questions, the more detailed the better.

Please post your list of questions as comments. If the repeat, great. We'll know that lots of people are interested in that information.

I plan on generating a report that will be organized around the questions rather than inline, so you can see what all the answers are to the question rather than collating that information from separate interviews.

If the Radiance Medical Spa here is an example of exactly how you don't want your medspa to be perceived as.

Via Plasticized:

"Radiance Medspa is a national franchise that has run into trouble with disgruntled owners and office closures.  In the cosmetic world, it can be a challenge to maintain quality over large distances with a range of practitioners with varying quality.  Some of the spas have broken away from the corporation. Others have closed in the last year.

Take a look at this Radiance website. The "highly skilled, licensed professionals " were unable to spell "specialization" and they left some latin text from the website template they ripped under "about us". Here is an example of how quality control can fail in a large entity"

I don't know if the Dermacare doctors have it any worse than these poor Radiance franchises.