Adding New Services to Your Practice: A Practical Guide

Practicing in an ever-advancing industry is exciting and stimulating for healthcare professionals eager to learn more. Owning your own practice requires you to acquire new skills to be able to offer the most cutting-edge services and provide desired results for patients. Leading the charge on implementing new services at your practice can put you ahead of the game in the medical aesthetics space and is vital for ensuring long-term patient satisfaction. However, keeping up with the latest scientific advancements can be challenging, especially if you lean towards an “if it’s not broken, don’t fit it” attitude. When you prepare correctly and implement best practices for adding new services to your practice, you will set yourself up for success and push yourself and your medical aesthetics team to the next level.

Choosing the Right Services for Your Practice

New fads in aesthetics don’t stop at just at-home hacks and social media trends. Many new services penetrate the market and claim to be the next best thing for aesthetic practitioners and their patients. As an operator of a medical clinic of any kind, it can be overwhelming to decipher which new services to invest time and energy into trying and which should be adopted as a service offering for existing and potential patients at your clinic. What has been successful for us is not being an early adopter. Once a new product or service launched in Canada, sit back, and observe the market trend.

Build Off Current Services

So where do you start? Well, take a step back and record and analyze what is already working for your practice. There’s a good chance you can answer off the top of your head what service is most popular among patients and the most profitable. There is also a good chance this service is either neurotoxin injectables or dermal fillers, as these made up over half of all non-surgical procedures in 2021.1

Let’s say injectables are your niche, and your practice currently offers soft-tissue (hyaluronic acid) HA fillers to patients who come into your practice. You may want to consider expanding to offer similar injectables such as Sculptra, as some treatment plans may benefit from using an alternative. The two treatments are similar, so this is a low-cost way to diversify your practice offerings without investing in capital equipment.

Know What’s Trending

Keeping up to date on current trends in aesthetic medicine will also be crucial for knowing when and how to refresh your service offerings. For example, when platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy rose to popularity about 10 years ago, much of the buzz around the procedure was because of celebrity endorsements. Their influence may push more potential patients in your area to inquire, and you can stay ahead of the curve by researching new technology and possibly adopting it as a service offering if it’s really worth the hype.

Keep Tabs on the Competition

Another strategy is to research what local competitors are doing and find a way to make your service offerings stand out. Unfortunately, the medical aesthetics space is becoming increasingly saturated, making it harder for practitioners to hold their own. If you are not currently offering a service that many are going to competitors for, it is unlikely that these patients will pivot to try your services. Knowing what is happening in your local market is crucial to developing your clinic as a well-rounded practice.

Evaluating and Investing in the Right Providers

Piloting new technologies in your practice can be a significant monetary risk if not backed by the right market and scientific evidence. From a business perspective, you want to prioritize service efficiency and ensure the demand meets the cost of offering the new service. However, you never want to cheap out where it countsin safety and efficacy. While you want to stay ahead of the curve and always be on the lookout for new technology, you also want all your service offerings to be backed with white papers, literature reviews, and of course, Health Canada or FDA approval.

Chances are, if your clinic is a registered and profitable public business, manufacturers have reached out trying to sell their medical devices to you. Here, it is important to take the time to do your own research, listen to demonstrations, and evaluate the feasibility of the service to do what it says it will. A lot of new treatments and technology will come on the market claiming miracle results, and it is your job to take the time to research whether or not that claim has any weight to it. Make sure to do a thorough cash flow analysis to ensure you’re able to pay the monthly payments or lease. For example, how many patients would you need to see to cover the cost of the machine? Don’t forget to include any consumables as these can often be considerable.

Staff Training

Having a medical spa full of trained and knowledgeable staff has many advantages. When introducing a new service, you want everyone qualified to know how it works so they are ready to offer it to patients. For hands-on training, you may opt to either train in-house or sign your staff up for an outsourced training program provided by the manufacturer’s team of experts.

In-house Training

As the owner of your practice, you are the ultimate knowledge keeper, and your staff are likely working for you in part because they want to learn directly from you. Being able to test drive new equipment within your practice and show your staff directly how it works benefits your practice as it helps to standardize procedures. This benefits your patients as they can trust they will get the same great results no matter the practitioner performing their service. Using demonstrations and supervised practice sessions on willing volunteers is a great way for your staff to get hands-on experience. Don’t shy away from hosting your own training workshops to give your staff these opportunities to learn.

Outsourced Training

Continuing education through conferences, master classes, and workshops outside of your clinical practice can also offer your staff invaluable experience in new technology. Often, when new techniques are introduced, few are immediately experts. Therefore, you and your staff need to stay up-to-date and engaged with opportunities to learn outside of the clinic, so you can master those techniques and turn them into service offerings for patients.

A Well-Rounded Team

There is also a benefit to welcoming administrative staff into organized training sessions, as often these are the client-facing individuals informing patients of what services are available, and they will inevitably be asked how they work. Through observing and listening to important terminology, information, risks for patients, and after-care instructions, your administrative staff will be better suited to help clients from the initial phone call to their leaving after their appointment.

Operating in the business of helping people feel their best is a rewarding experience. Knowing how and when to update your clinic’s offerings will keep you on top of your game and helps ensure your patients are receiving the best of the best. Nurturing your own education so you can share it with your staff will be the key to keeping your aesthetic clinic on top.

1. The Aesthetic Society. Aesthetic Plastic Surgery National Databank STATISTICS 2020–2021. Accessed August 3, 2023. https://cdn.theaestheticsociety.org/media/statistics/2021-TheAestheticSocietyStatistics.pdf