The Wellness Model Bringing New Patients to Aesthetics
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The future of aesthetics is looking more digital—and more wellness-driven. Chad Sawyer, Chief Revenue Officer of DrWell, shares how technology is reshaping patient care.
DrWell, the new evolution of the Build My Bod platform, helps providers streamline wellness and weight loss programs, from GLP-1s to peptides and longevity treatments. Chad explains how asynchronous consultations—where patients complete medical forms online and get quick approvals—are helping practices compete with big brands.
Hear about the rise of wellness medicine and how it’s bringing new patients into aesthetic practices. Find out why telehealth, automation, and integrated tech are the next big drivers of growth in aesthetics.
Recorded live at the ASPS Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
About Chad Sawyer
Chad Sawyer is the Chief Revenue Officer at Dr. Well, a rebrand of BuildMyHealth, where he helps aesthetic and wellness practices integrate price transparency, virtual consultations, and modern patient engagement tools. With a background in medical marketing at Crystal Clear Digital Marketing and PatientNow, Chad has become a respected industry voice in tech-driven growth strategies for aesthetic medicine. He’s passionate about advancing accessibility, compliance, and innovation across the aesthetics and wellness industries.
Learn more about DrWell
Follow DrWell on Instagram @drwellrx
Connect with Chad on LinkedIn
Guest
Chad Sawyer, Chief Revenue Officer,
DrWell
Host
Tyler Terry, Director of Sales, MedSpa
Nextech
Transcript
Announcer (00:06):
You are listening to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast presented by Nextech.
Tyler Terry (00:13):
Hey guys, welcome back to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Terry. We are coming to you live from the lively New Orleans ASPS 2025 here live at the conference. And I'm here with one of my favorite colleagues, somebody that I consider a very good friend of mine, Chad Sawyer, who is the CR at Dr. Well. Chad, welcome to the show.
Chad Sawyer (00:41):
Hey, thanks for having me on. Tyler.
Tyler Terry (00:43):
Let's go ahead and kick it off with just tell our audience a little bit about you.
Chad Sawyer (00:46):
Yeah, so in the space, probably since before I graduated college, I started doing shows like this with my dad, having me follow him around At the time, that was Crystal Clear Digital Marketing. They went through an exit where they got bought by another company in this space and stayed there for a little while, had some fun, it wasn't necessarily where I wanted to be. And then Dr. Kaplan, who people I know as real Dr. Bay, had this software platform that he was working on for about 10 years called Build My Bod. And him and I kind of went back and forth a lot thinking about how can we grow that? And then when it came to a place where I was looking to do something different, gave him a call and said, Hey, Dr. Kaplan, let's build this thing. And then pretty quickly because of some of the success that he was having in his practice, we went away from the Price estimator stuff, getting into weight loss and working with GLP ones and helping practices source their medications and stay compliant. And then one thing kind of led to another with that whole side of the business. And then we rebranded to Doctor Well, where now we're working with people to help them not only with their weight loss programs, but we've expanded into all things wellness. So we're seeing things around peptides and skincare, and you name it, if you're trying to enhance your longevity, we're working with practices to help them make that as easy as possible for themselves and for the patients.
Tyler Terry (02:12):
Yeah, no, that's amazing. So first off, I love the name Dr. Well, I think it was a good name, a good change to the brand. And not to say that Build my BOD wasn't great, but Dr. Well, very easy to say rolls off the tongue beautifully, but I want you to tell me a little bit about Dr. Well tell me about this software.
Chad Sawyer (02:31):
So Dr. Well is a platform that allows you to grow and scale weight and wellness programs. And so when you look at running a weight loss program or if you've expanded into things, there's a lot of challenges that come up with running those programs. Whether you're getting some pushback from your payment processor around, Hey, we're not necessarily sure that you should be running transactions for GLP ones, or if you're looking for ways to get these patients into your program, but you don't want to take away from your surgical or non-surgical treatments that maybe require a little bit more hands-on attention for patients. And then you start running into sourcing pharmacies and we've seen the changes in what's allowed and what isn't allowed with compound pharmacies and having to jump from one supplier to another. And what's the easiest way to not get lost in who has what product and where are we ordering from today and what patients have we enrolled in each of these pharmacy portals?
(03:26):
Dr Well has streamlined that entire process. So connecting patient's medications and their billing schedules to where the medication needs to go, and having the flexibility to ship medication to a physical practice or if the patient prefers to get at home, enabling that easy drop ship capabilities to now we've started doing a lot with these asynchronous consultations, which for those not familiar is essentially a patient questionnaire and they got made pretty popular from these big direct consumer platforms, your hims, your hers, where we're all seeing the commercials as we're watching football on Sunday to get your medications from those places. And
Tyler Terry (04:02):
I use himss.
Chad Sawyer (04:03):
Yeah, alright. So what we're trying to do is that same ease where you were able to go online, get access to a provider, get medications, how can we put that technology in the hands of a trusted medical provider where you can still have that same access to the meds that you want without being forced to come in once a week to get whatever it is, but still doing that under the supervision of a provider who is really involved in your life and can make the correct changes to whatever treatment plan and whatever outcome you're trying to achieve.
Tyler Terry (04:32):
That's great. Thank you for that. So let's break it down. If I'm here, if I'm at the conference, I sign up with you, how does it work? Walk me through how I set it up, how it gets tailored and branded to me. Is it white labeled? Walk me through all of it.
Chad Sawyer (04:48):
So we definitely want to make it clear that the relationships that a practice builds with their patients is through the practice. So the system is entirely white labeled to the clinic. It really easy to build out, even though we're doing a lot of more complicated things that you might have to manually do in the practice, you can get it done in three clicks. And so in terms of building it out, it's super simple. We take a web link, we include it into your website to a patient questionnaire where if someone wants to get started on a weight loss program, instead of them having to contact you or schedule online where maybe your first availability is two weeks out, if you're a high volume clinic, they have that immediate access to you. Once they fill out those questionnaires, you can review that on your own time when you have the ability to get in there and look at those responses. And in most states, that can serve as the consultation and no need for any further conversation. We're not telling people that they can't have that if they want to, but once you get, if you want to grow and scale an existing weight and wellness program, we get people, they'll sign up at this event and they'll be up and running ordering medications by Monday of next week.
Tyler Terry (05:54):
Really it's that quick.
Chad Sawyer (05:54):
It's plug and play. It's just a matter of figuring out what medications do you want to bring to your patients, maybe what do you want to provide that to? What's the price point on some of those things? You have to work through those, but once you figure that out, it's ready to go.
Tyler Terry (06:07):
So explain to our audience how they technically, depending on the state, let's use California as an example, they technically don't need to have a consultation.
Chad Sawyer (06:17):
So California and 31 other states, and this is one of the things that we're always tracking, and it's always fun to watch because these states will flip what you can and can't do all the time, but in a state that you can utilize an asynchronous consultation, it says that if you get explicit consent, you get all the medical information that doesn't need to be done in a visit like we're having right now, that can be done online at 11 o'clock at night. You as a provider can come in when you have that time, go on your phone, read through all the medical history, assuming there's no major contraindications, and they meet all the requirements that you have to prescribe a GLP one, California 31 states says that meets the requirements for the good faith exam and you don't need to meet with them. For a lot of people, that's crazy to start thinking about, especially for the people that we're working with.
Tyler Terry (07:06):
But it streamlines it and you guys are proactive to be watching that radar. You have a pulse on those 32 states, right? California plus the 31. And like you said, they're changing. I think what's cool is that you're monitoring that, and if that did change, obviously you would let the practices know, right?
Chad Sawyer (07:23):
Yeah. We actually have a little thing in the platform. We have providers who they have licenses across multiple states and some of those laws are different in those states. So we flag every patient inside of Dr. Well as to what's required. And so you can actually use the asynchronous consultation in all 50 states, the 18 states that say you just have to have some type of conversation with the patient essentially confirming that all of the responses are true and from them. So you need to get that verbal confirmation that says yes, what I responded on the questionnaire is good. You don't have to have a full consultation because you already have all the information. You just need to have that one touch point by not requiring people to come in and see you have in-person, some people are coming in and they're saying, Hey, you have to come get an injection from us weekly.
(08:10):
The number of people that you're turning away in hopes of getting those touch points to be able to cross-sell other treatments with the technology that you can use. If you have a CRM tool or some of the things that you guys are doing in terms of being able to promote other services via email, text on social media, on your site, you can get a lot of those touch points without having them come in and GLP ones or anything wellness related becomes that gateway to your practice. So that's what a lot of our providers have found, and there hasn't been this huge uptick in patients who are overdosing themselves or having all these crazy side effects. They're still getting the same results that they were as if they're going through an in-person consultation.
Tyler Terry (08:49):
And usually the in-person consultation was a one-time thing anyways. Yeah, it's interesting. You're solving an issue for the patient. You're saving them time, you're also saving the provider time, and then you're also giving this, you're empowering this type of service back to the provider so that the HIMSS and the hers don't get all of the patients that really should be going back to the practice.
Chad Sawyer (09:12):
That's who's taking all the patients. Right. Dr. Kaplan talks about it all the time. The Med Spa or the Plastic Surgery clinic across the street when it comes to these medications, that's not who you're competing with. You're competing with these huge billion dollar companies that have unlimited ad spend and make it super easy for patients to get those medications. And if they don't have a similar option, they're going to be forced to go to these websites when that should be coming back into your practice.
Tyler Terry (09:40):
So talk to me a little bit about wellness and just the wellness space as a category and how you've seen it grow.
Chad Sawyer (09:49):
It's changed a lot. So going back three years, when we started working with people, truly it was weight loss to start GLP one and Semaglutide Tears peptide, you hear the word peptide pop up. There's all sorts of these new medications now where patients are wanting to not just go on a GLP one, but they want to stack these medications. And so we're constantly seeing more and more patients ask the providers in our network, Hey, do you have NAD plus? Do you have this? Or, I'm struggling with this, what else can I get? And so the number of medications that patients are asking about has been pretty crazy. So to put in perspective, three years ago, if you look at the orders being placed through Dr. Well, a hundred percent of those orders were for GLP one Semaglutide, tirzepatide, and now I think we had over 250 unique medications prescribed through our platform last month. And it's a combination of all the different hormones that you have options for. There's different ways that you can do NAD plus, whether they want injections or some patients prefer nasal sprays, creams, everyone wants something beyond GLP ones and there's amazing clinical benefits to them.
Tyler Terry (11:04):
What would you say is your favorite wellness treatment?
Chad Sawyer (11:07):
Well, selfishly I lost 27 pounds using GLP one. So that was a great start.
Tyler Terry (11:12):
You look great. I mean that. Come on.
Chad Sawyer (11:14):
Hey, I'll take it where I can get it. Travel life isn't always the easiest.
Tyler Terry (11:18):
It's true, you do eat a little late and a little more, and
Chad Sawyer (11:21):
I'm not the most motivated guy to get up at 4:00 AM and get down to the gym before having to get here for six o'clock. So I'll take any help. I can get beyond that, the one that I have done and continue to do, so I actually like NAD plus a lot, and I use the nasal spray, so I get an NAD plus nasal spray. I take it in the morning, gives me a little extra jolt of energy. So that would be my favorite, NAD plus.
Tyler Terry (11:50):
That's great. So let's shift gears a little bit. Where do you see the market going in terms of not just wellness, but wellness and aesthetics? You have experience in both very unique experience. Where do you see it going over the next, let's just say 2030? Where are we?
Chad Sawyer (12:06):
Well, so the thing is, we're just scratching the surface in terms of not just the people who are coming going on these, but the medications available. I mean, there's dozens of medications that are going through trials right now that are about to get approved. Reditrutide, which is Lilly's new three receptor, so it's a G-L-P-G-I-P and glucagon. That's what that's mimicking. And they're saying that could have bariatric surgery levels of weight loss behind it with no side effects, and we'll see if that's what, and so you start, then once that comes up, there's going to be another thing. And so as medicine progresses, there's going to be more options there. As people become comfortable with these other medications and peptides, I think you're going to see a lot of people wanting to go on those things more and more. One of the things that we see, and I don't know that this is, I don't have a ton of data to support this other than the everyday conversations that I'm having, but some practices are noticing that maybe some of their injectables are down or their body contouring devices are down, and how are we getting those patients to come back into the practices and using wellness as a way to recapture those patients or find new patients that maybe never considered going into a med spa or a plastic surgery practice because they're thinking, that's not for me, but you're doing these other things now that maybe do meet what they're looking for.
(13:26):
And then they can get introduced to all those other treatments through that. There's a study McKinsey report, it was like 67% of people who are on these GLP products have never considered going into a med spa before who are getting it from med spas or plastic surgery practices. So you have this huge influx of patients that are coming into aesthetic practices that otherwise would not be there. They would not, and then that's when they're starting to get their Botox, get their sculp or whatever devices and treatments that you have. So I think as people, as more competition comes in with all these practices, figuring out how to get more patients, I think wellness and the more that you have and the more options and the more areas that you can help people with is going to get you into more of those traditional aesthetic services that maybe in your practice have declined a little bit.
Tyler Terry (14:17):
I'd love to just end it with where do you see aesthetics? We're talking wellness, but you have a vast experience in aesthetics. We're at a plastic surgery meeting. You have a lot of experience with med spa and derm. Where do you see, let's tap into your aesthetic knowledge here. Where do you see aesthetics going?
Chad Sawyer (14:37):
I think it's keeping up with more technology and figuring out how to get patients what they want even easier. And everyone's time is becoming harder to get, and everyone's got a lot going on, and I think you're going to see more and more people, whether it's telehealth or some type of virtual medicine component. I think that's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. I think that's for sure.
Tyler Terry (15:02):
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Well, Chad, I just want to thank you for your time. Want to thank you for your friendship.
Chad Sawyer (15:07):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tyler. It's been good.
Tyler Terry (15:08):
One of the best guys I know, obviously super talented at what you do.
Chad Sawyer (15:12):
Second to you, only second to you.
Tyler Terry (15:14):
I love your family. You have a great family, your dad, your brother, your mom, your dad's story is super inspiring. And then just kind of growing up in the industry alongside you has been pretty cool to grow alongside you and super proud of you and all that you've accomplished and will accomplish.
Chad Sawyer (15:34):
Yeah, same to you. I mean, look at, you got your own podcast now. You got all the fancy equipment. I mean, come on. Who's got it better than you?
Tyler Terry (15:40):
That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. Yeah. No, thank you so much, man. And again, we'd love to have you back on the show. And for those of you listening, be sure to check out the show notes to follow Chad, to follow Dr Well on LinkedIn, social, all the things that they have. And if you have any questions, be sure to reach out to them. And until next time, Chad, thank you for your time.
Chad Sawyer (16:04):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tyler.
Tyler Terry (16:05):
Thank you.
Announcer (16:07):
Thanks for listening to Aesthetically Speaking, the podcast where beauty meets business, presented by Nextech. Follow and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Links to the resources mentioned on this podcast or available in your show notes. For more information about Nextech visit nextech.com or to learn more about TouchMD, go to touchmd.com. Aesthetically Speaking is a production of The Axis.
