Consult booked is not treatment scheduled

A note on what this is: a description of how we configure the pipeline for aesthetic practices, and why. It is not legal advice, and whether a particular med spa is a HIPAA covered entity is a question for its counsel; the build is designed to be careful either way.

The inquiry arrives at midnight

Aesthetic inquiries come in late. A person researching a treatment does it after the house is quiet, on a phone, in the language they think in, and sends the same question to three practices before bed. The one that answers first, with a real consult time, in the right language, usually gets the consult. That part of the story is the same as every other vertical and the automations post covers it. The med spa story starts after the consult.

The stage nobody tracks

A consult happens. The provider proposes a plan: a series, a package, a first treatment with a follow-up. The person says yes, or says they will think about it, or asks about financing. Then they leave. In most practices that person now exists in three places: the consult is in the calendar as done, the plan is in the chart, and the follow-up is in somebody’s memory. Nothing is watching the gap.

The pipeline we ship for aesthetics has a stage called treatment plan proposed. A card moves there automatically when the consult is marked complete, and it stays there until a treatment is scheduled or the person says no. Cards in that stage age visibly. After a threshold the practice sets, they turn red. The owner can see at any moment how much proposed work is sitting between a consult and a chair, in dollars, by provider.

What the follow-up says, and when

The follow-up from that stage is short and specific. It refers to the plan the person already heard, offers real times for the first treatment, and mentions financing only if the person asked. It goes out in the language of the inquiry. It does not describe the treatment, quote a before-and-after, or promise a result; the FTC’s rules on health claims apply to the text message as much as to the website.

• • First follow-up the next business morning, inside the window.
• • Second, three days later, if there has been no reply and no booking.
• • A third and last automated touch a week after that, then the card flags for a human.
• • At every step: reply cancels, booking cancels, STOP or ALTO or PARE cancels everything.

Packages, memberships, and the second stage

The same logic runs after the first treatment. A series has a next session; a membership has a renewal date; a package has a balance. Each of those is a stage with a date, and each date has a reminder in the person’s language. The report then shows the practice something it has never seen as a number: how many consults became first treatments, how many first treatments became series, and where in that chain the drop happens.

The covered-entity question, handled without answering it

A purely cosmetic, cash-pay practice that conducts no electronic standard transactions with health plans may not be a HIPAA covered entity. Or it may be. We do not decide that, and neither should a CRM vendor; your counsel does. What we can say is that the build is the same either way: intake forms inside the HIPAA-enabled platform under a BAA, first-touch messages carrying logistics rather than clinical detail, and consent captured separately from everything else. A practice that later turns out to be covered has nothing to rebuild. One that is not has lost nothing by being careful.

Questions we get asked about this

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