Dr. Jose A. Garcia, Medical Director of Aura Laser Skin Care

Dr. Jose A. Garcia takes part in molding new physicians in cosmetic medicine and surgery. Is he seeing a paradigm shift in medical education?

Name: Jose A. Garcia, MD, FACOG, FACS, FICS, FAACS
Clinic: Aura Laser Skin Care
Location: Kirkland/Bothell, WA
Website: AuraLaser.com

That's interesting: From the inception time of Aura Laser Skin Care back in 2005, we looked at the many technologies that were available and decided to go with the ELOS technology by Syneron. ELOS stands for electro-optical-synergy and combines both radio frequency with light energies to produce safe and effective treatment. Furthermore, for laser hair removal, Syneron uses the 810 diode which is fast and works for all hair color and skin types. We initially looked at the ND Yag by Cutera as well as the Alexandrite. The problem was that the Alex is painful and good for skin types 1 and 2. The ND Yag is best suited for skin types 3,4, and in some cases 5. That meant that we had to purchase 2 lasers or a combo Alex-Yag laser as opposed to only one laser with Syneron.

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The Power Of The Botox Birthday Coupon

For the past 5 years, our plastic surgery office has been offering patients birthday coupons worth $50 off their Botox injections.  

I've been impressed with the power of this Birthday Coupon. Basically this is a letter sent out via a group email with birthdays identified one month at a time. Our EMR is able to identify birthdays which are coming up. Of course we take advantage of the blind cc: email function soin order to protect patient privacy. We also let our patients use it for fillers instead of Botox, and because all patients are getting this email who have a birthday coming up, some patients aren't appropriate for Botox or fillers, and thus we allow them to pass it along as a "regift."

It brings back patients whom I haven't seen in while.  It also brings back patients who have wandered off to other Botox places.  I've also seen new patients who have never received Botox before because they got a the coupon tactfully passed along from one of our existing patients.  And best outcome is when a patient is converted over from an unrelated plastic surgery procedure such as breast augmentation or tummy tuck (already happy and familiar with our office), and now he or she is armed with coupon in hand ready to try Botox!  And in general, our patients seem very grateful for the gift - especially the ones who have already used our services every 3-5 months.  Another benefit of the Birthday Letter is that it makes patients eager to give us their email addresses to stay in touch.

For our office, it's Botox that we use, but I think this concept could be converted to another product or service which helps patients look younger.

The Birthday, itself, of course is a great event, however it does remind all of us that we are getting older, and getting Botox is one of the ways to help us age more gracefully.  I think using a cosmetic injection coupon is a great marketing tool and I've seen a good return on the investment for our own plastic surgical practice.  Best of all, patients seem to really like it and it is a "win-win."

Plastic Surgery & Body Enhancement Infographic

The business of plastic surgery and body enhancement.

How much are people really spending on body enhancing procedures? The infographic below answers these questions in interesting detail.

Dr. Alex Kaplan, Celebrity Laser Spa & Surgical Center In LA

Dr. Alex Kaplan has targeted a niche market...celebrities.

Name: Alex Kaplan MD
Clinic: Celebrity Laser Spa & Surgical Center
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Website: CelebrityLaserSpa.com

That's interesting: The Kaplans are big proponents of the "Made in the USA" movement, purchasing Made in the USA office supplies and products whenever possible. When you come to Celebrity Laser Spa, know that you are supporting a small business, real people and all things Made in the USA too!

Can you share your career path as a cosmetic surgeon?

I attended residency in combined general and plastic surgery at University of Chicago.  After attending 5 years there. During residency at UCLA, I volunteered to provide laser tattoo removal at a gang intervention program in East Los Angeles. This gave me the idea to start a cosmetic laser practice specializing in laser tattoo removal. My medical spa was one of the first to specialize in laser tattoo removal. We started making a name for ourselves, growing over the years and adding a variety of other services to the practice, and we are now well-known in Los Angeles as Celebrity Laser Spa & Surgical Center.

How is your practice organized? What types of medical technologies do you have and how did you select them?

From the beginning I have taken care to use technologies that offer a proven value to patients. I strive to offer procedures that offer a unique advantage over other techniques, If I don’t think a product works well, or the science behind it doesn’t make sense, I wont offer it at my practice. I am one of the first providers for new technologies, such as Tickle Lipo, Dermapen and Picosure.

I am the sole owner of CLS and work with several mid-level providers and

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Jean M. Casello MD, Medical Director Of Renovo MD In Shrewsbury, MA

Dr. Jean M. Casello entered the world of the cosmetic industry with uncertainty, which paved the way for a flourishing practice.

Name: Jean M. Casello,MD
Clinic: Renovo MD
Location: Shrewsbury, MA
Website: RenovoMD.com

Can you tell us more about the daily operations of your clinic?

Our clinic is composed of an office manager, receptionist and a part time in-house marketing director. The office manager takes care of the day to day running of the office. On the clinical side, I am on site full time and I have a full time esthetician. We are in the process of hiring another esthetician and a nurse to do the injectables.

We offer comprehensive services: fillers, Botox, IPL, LED treatments, fraxel resurfacing, electrology, skin tightening, sclerotherapy, permanent makeup, chemical peels and pharmaceutical grade products. We have recently added tattoo removal.

Our patient population is mostly women from 40-70 years old. We also have a fairly large population of teenagers with acne. About 20% of our patients are men.

We are located in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. We are in a small town about 40 miles outside of Boston. We see patients 4 days a week in this office and one day a week at our off site off

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Push & Pull Marketing Within Your Medical Spa

Push Marketing is any type of marketing that pushes a client through your medical spas door.

It may be a referral from a satisfied client, or possibly a business partner. It may be an article in a publication, a video interview or a promotional video you made. To put it simply, it's marketing that covers everything except ads.

Pull Marketing on the other hand is anything that "pulls" a consumer through your door. These are mainly your marketing materials such as your main website and your advertising, especially those "Specials" ads. Don't forget that these "Specials" are targeting customers that are either unfamiliar to your practice or unfamiliar with your products/services.

It's obvious that higher conversion rate is expected from Push Marketing because people already have a general idea of what you are offering. Before they arrive at your door, they already hold a positive opinion of you. That is unless there's anything unfortunate that comes along the way. These bad marketing bridges may be as simple as poor office behavior, overpricing, etc. Generally speaking, you should be able to convert over 90% of all your push consumers.

In order to increase your conversions in the Pull marketing, it is important to focus on the consumer's trust. If you own an aesthetic practice, adding high quality before/after photos (this needs permission of course!) will definitely increase the consumer's trust as well as adding testimonials to your marketing materials and website from your customers. You can do so by providing testimonials in both writing and videos to your blog, newsletters and auto-responder emails.

If you are able to have access to passers-by that are potentially customers, consider putting banners in your windows showing before/after results. This is great if you're offering aesthetic treatments. But again, make sure you have the patient's permission to use their images, especially if it's in a very public form.

Brian Buinewicz MD, Plastic Surgeon At Le MedSpa In New Jersey

Juggling tasks at the medspa, at a hospital and at the university is no easy task. Let's see how Dr. Buinewicz handle multiple responsibilities and manage priorities.

Name: Dr. Brian Buinewicz
Clinic: Le MedSpa of Buckingham and Flemington
Location: Doylestown, PA and Flemington, NJ
Website: lemedspabucks.com

Your clinic basically offers a holistic approach in a sense that it covers everything from face, to body and even health and nutrition. How did you grow your business? How is your clinic organized? 

Our practice is a dual physician based practice covering all of the patient’s needs from nutrition, exercise, primary health care, weight management in addition to our full service medical spa and plastic surgery services. The business grew naturally by constantly offering the best and newest treatments for our patients. We evolved over the years to have a “tool chest” full of options to offer our patients, not just surgical intervention, for example. When the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail.

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Your Medical Spa's Front Desk

It's easy find sub-par front desk staff in medical spas.

I got this complaint (I'm not sure why it was even sent to me) of someone who ended up leaving a clinic less than impressed...

Here's the comment:

If you're a cosmetic surgeon, a cosmetic dermatologist or even a cosmetic dentist, the gals at the front should somehow represent your practice. Your's have much to be desired.

I recently had an appointment at your clinic I was able to make the following observations.

1. She had blackheads
2. Too little makeup (which made the blackheads visible)
3. Chewing gum
4. Her hair in a ponytail in a way that looks like a rat's nest thingy
5. Wearing some kind of jammy looking top.
6. Could have used a more supportive brassiere.

I left very disappointed...These things should never be seen in any medical spa.

The front desk should be the bus drivers! It means they are the first person you'll see when you enter the bus and the most likely person to cause an accident. Do you understand? If you don't like the sight of the girls you see out front, then there's something wrong about the "Aesthetic" services you're providing.

Now, look at your girls out in front. If they look anything like what I observed, then you should talk to them. Perhaps you need a dress code. Maybe you should provide them the product and treatments that your office is offering. Pamper your staff a little. Besides, it will be easier for them to sell your services since they have first hand experience.

However, one should not be to brash in saying these things since people can be very sensitive, especially women. Consider it from a perspective of a prospective client when they walk through your door. Will they wonder, "why doesn't the front desk person look anything like the product they're offering?" and "what's she doing in a place like this? She doesn't seem to belong".

While the email is obviously not actually for me since I no longer own any clinics, the sentiments represented are spot on. I don't know what clinic gave rise to this email but you'll want to make sure that your medical spa's front desk represents you the way you'd want it to.

Making Your Medical Spas Homepage Succeed

Have you ever found anything similar with the fastest growing companies in the world today? (Hint: It's not overwhelming choice.)

For the fastest growing companies today, there seem to be some common denominators. I'm not sure if they got around together and discussed how they should make their homepages but it seems they stumbled into something important. Perhaps I could share some observations that you may be able to apply to your medical spas site, or pricing, or something.

First, you can't access their content without any signup. There are a lot of startup companies that make a mistake of giving people free access to their site whether it's apartment bookings or making schedules. Often times this is a bad idea. As much as we would like it to be, if your visitor can interact with a lot of things before signing up, then he will most likely not sign up.

Secondly, there is an absence of many links and in many cases just a single option. For many years, many internet marketers developed this "Squeeze Page" with minimal content and a single "call-to-action". They figured out that adding more information could distract a visitor and could cause them to click away to different websites. If you notice in the snapshots of these websites, there are not many links.

Third, focus on a single and clear value proposition. Often times, your products value is drilled down into one clear statement. It's some sort of slogan which clearly states what your product is about. Most people never read past the first sentence and it's important to get your thoughts across with just one statement or sentence. You could also consider this as your testing ground. Just change one sentence and see which one works.

Fourth, people are selfish. Contrary to popular belief, people don't share as much as everyone hopes. Most startups start thinking that people will use their product because it helps them share things more easily. Unfortunately, even people who share don't share things all of the time.

Fifth, they have big images. A picture paints a thousand words. So does a big image.

Lastly, they have embedded signup forms. Make your signup process available from the homepage so people don't have to navigate through a lot of links just to sign up. Generally speaking, the more clicks you have in your signup process, the more likely people will drop off halfway. If you notice, most of them have the signup forms in the upper right hand corner of the homepage, above the fold. Most of them rarely ask more than your name, email and password.

Whenever I tell people about these things, they say, "Everyone's already on facebook or Twitter, so I don't really have to explain what my products are about."

You're wrong.

Maybe everyone we're connected to are already familiar with Twitter and Facebook. However, we're not trying to connect to just me and you. You're trying to market your medspa or clinic to all of people who use the internet (in your area at least) and believe me when I say that not all of them have heard of Twitter or Facebook. Those are the people that these homepages are trying to sign up.

There's a lot that your medical spa can learn as a business and taking to heart what some of the fastest growing businesses in the world are doing will be time well spent. Take a look at your home page and ask yourself what your goals really are.

Dealing With Pain As A Physician

I admit it! I was channel surfing between CSPAN and the Lehrer News Hour...

...and not so accidentally, stumbled upon one of the Kardashian sisters getting some sort of "minimally-invasive" facial rejuvenation procedure in a posh Miami medical office. The procedure was fairly routine, but what really caught my eye was the incredible amount of pain this young lady was willing to endure. I reflected back to my training in Plastic Surgery and General Surgery, and realized how little attention we paid, as a community, to pain.

I often find myself bringing up to my patients a "Postop Pain Plan", only to find them caught in a moment of bewilderment. "I thought I'm not gonna feel anything", I hear sometimes. In recent years, the increasing dumbing down of medicine and plastic surgery in pop culture media, has some people denying the existence of pain after surgery. Furthermore, of the ones that do expect some postop pain, few expect to define a specific plan for managing that pain. Albeit, they come to me with much greater concerns about their appearances, but nonetheless, the change in appearance comes at a price.

As plastic surgeons, we need to address the issue of pain in a more sincere and serious manner. We need to stop painting rosy pictures and admit to our patients that surgery is painful, that what they are asking us to do is, unfortunately and necessarily, inflict pain. We need to implement a Pain Plan. A simple, lay-term, and effective protocol addressing individual patients' postop pain control needs. We also need to document the plan and incorporate it into our informed consent plan.

As patients, we need to inquire within. Ask our surgeons about the nature of the pain, the duration, the severity. We need to request a specific plan, and decide preoperatively how to manage the pain. But most importantly, we need to stop believing everything we see and read in the lay media. We need to realize that elective surgery is surgery nonetheless. It hurts, and we ask for it. So let's treat it like the serious business it is.

The importance of responding to "ALL" Online Reviews

In this day and age of Internet “authors” almost all of us that own aesthetic practices have a new challenge to meet.  

How to deal with online reviews? We all know the impact of online reviews that are negative. In looking through over a 50 websites with reviews I found a troubling statistic. 97% of these websites only responded to negative reviews and missed out on a golden opportunity to improve their search engine ratings by responding to every review.

Let’s look at the first impact of only responding to negative reviews and that’s being put in a reactive mode that is going to almost always be defensive and will stand out like a sore thumb. I urge you to think like a patient when reading reviews and especially replies to reviews. If you were a patient and had taken time to write a positive review wouldn’t you liked to be thanked for it? Wouldn’t you like to read that the owner/physician of this practice also took their time to reply back to you?

By only replying to negative reviews we usually create a negative stream of content to and from.  In most cases that I read through, the negative review would generate 2 replies from both the poster and the owner/physician and the more post, the higher the positioning will be. Now contrast that with replying to all reviews. If you have 30 online reviews on Google and reply to all of them, you effectively have 60 reviews. 

It does not need to be lengthy. Something as simple as “Thanks so much for taking the time to let us know of your outstanding results. My team and I love what we do and look forward to seeing you again soon”. If you were a perspective patient looking for a place to visit and read how engaged the practice is with their patients, wouldn’t you be more inclined to visit a place that looks like they really, really care? Of course you would…

The other positive aspect of replying to reviews as the owner is that you can quickly bury a negative review off of page one. All it takes is the creation of and responding to 3-5 positive reviews and the 5^th down negative review is now on page two. When replying to negative reviews also try and think like a perspective patient.  Try not to engage the patient unless they misrepresented their visit. Something like, “I was sorry to learn of this negative experience.  We greatly value both your treatment and our reputation.  Please email me at () with the details of what happened so I can get involved and work at trying to find a solution to this issue and thanks so much for letting us know”.  Now if you were again a perspective patient and read the owners reply, wouldn’t your image of the practice still be very high despite a negative review.

Now get to work on finding a mutually agreeable win/win solution. In most cases, you will be able to find some way to satisfy the patient. If not at least the reader will see that you tried by your initial response. If however you try and “air” the defense of the negative review online, it will usually result in an ugly exchange that will benefit no one.

So, embrace all the online pontificators. The old adage, “if you can’t beat them, join them” applies as does “silence is acceptance”. Let everyone read how much you care by replying to all reviews.

Healthcare Communities On The Rise