Building A Medical Spa Inside Your Existing Medical Practice

physicians conundrum:Everywhere, physicians are contemplating or engaged in expanding into the "medical spa" market. Seduced by the media buzz around this hot new phenomenon, many doctors see the medical spa as a means boosting their income and eliminating the growing grind and countless headaches of their daily practice. They read about growth statistics, see dazzling new equipment at trade shows, watch competitors popping up, and fear that they may be falling behind the times. With pen in hand they're ready to sign lease agreements, loan documents, and lots of checks in order to catch up with a crowd of savvy entrepreneurs who know where the real action is. And the truth is, they're right. Medical spas are the natural evolution of cosmetic Medicine, and those who don't join the revolution will watch from the sidelines as their fate is decided.

Medical spas are the forerunner of a revolution. From Galen until now, the primary method of care has been through the hands and individual knowledge of a physician. But that's changing. The default method of care is becoming technology based. In every market and time, technologies are developed that replace an individuals knowledge and skill.

Lasers, IPLs, radio frequency, infrared, personal DNA testing, Pointe Lift?, Liposolve?, Clear, PDT, telomere clipping, anti-aging drugs and a smorgasbord of other technologies in development promise to change Medicine in the same way that computers, jet engines, and GPS have changed aviation. Technology now enables a technician (under medical supervision) to perform effective medical treatments and places the physician in an oversight roll instead of being the primary practitioner. In the near future, physicians will have more in common with an astronauts than the Wright Brothers.

But changing technology poses very deep problems for physicians. Technology allows easy replication and scalability, forces an unimaginably steep new learning curve on overworked doctors, and eliminates many of the barriers and protections that physicians have relied on in the past. And it's only going to get worse.

Consider this. The combination of markets that Surface competes in is huge (40-50 billion per year and growing), highly fragmented (individual practitioner model), completely new (technology based), and free of any meaningful national players (yet). Already there are very deep pockets investigating ways to exploit this emerging marketplace. The Wal-Marts and Home Depots of this new medical marketplace are being built.

But there's opportunity as well. Technology opens new doors for physicians who can manage this new paradigm. That's why a ready supply of smart and motivated physicians tired of the daily grind of insurance patients are moving into the marketplace and successfully competing. For the first time, physicians outside the current specialties of plastic surgery (cutting and stitching) and dermatology (diseases of the skin) have the potential to earn the income of these "big money" specialties. This new market will inevitably give rise to a new specialty whose focus will be "non-surgical cosmetic medical technologies". You can see the fragmentation today. Many dermatologists now label themselves as "cosmetic" to market themselves as a subspecialty.

Hurry up and wait. You can't get enough good information fast enough. But this is a new Business and demands a huge investment of time to make the right decisions. sales reps will stream into your clinic armed with charts and graphs that go up and to the right, advertisers will drop phrases like "top of mind awareness", and you'll have a creeping suspicion that the market is getting away from you. Go slow. There are a host of land mines in the area and there are some that will be advising you to jump directly on them.

So, how do you build a medical spa inside your existing practice? Surface has three locations, four physicians, master aestheticians, technicians, patient coordinators, managers and office staff. Every treatment at Surface is governed by a set of proprietary protocols. As a B