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New Medspa owners opening their doors after months of effort building out a space, hiring a team, and deciding what treatments to offer have been finding themselves running into a surprise barrier just as they're ready to see clients: a shortage of bacteriostatic saline.
Neurotoxins (Botox, Dysport, Xeomin) must be diluted with bacteriostatic saline prior to injection. Though the cost of the saline for a given injection is only a few pennies, saline is used for a wide range of injections both at Medspas and at hospitals, and a recent spike in demand caught suppliers by surprise, leading to a nationwide shortage.
The largest medical supply distributors (for example, McKesson and Henry Schein) quickly responded by prioritizing existing accounts, ensuring that their best customers don’t experience any impact. As a result, most operating Medspas may not have noticed the shortage, but anyone trying to open found they suddenly had to scramble to get a cheap and simple ingredient.
For Moxie partners, we saw an opportunity to step in and use our scaled back-office to help: we called every compounding pharmacy in the states in which we have partners and helped each of them secure enough supply such that everyone can operate until the shortage is expected to be resolved (expected between October and January).
Specifically:
- We called and spoke with pharmacists at over 387 pharmacies across 13 states.
- We found 28 pharmacies with some remaining supply, including at least one in each state we targeted. We kept calling to find this many, because often they only had 2-4 vials left.
- We worked with partners to order enough for their forecasted needs through the expected end of the shortage, plus some buffer.
If you’re running into roadblocks like this as you build your practice and want this level of support, give us a shout!
