Skin & Aesthetic Centers is a private equity-backed dermatology management organization spanning 5 practices, 58 providers, and 39 locations across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Minnesota. Certified Dermatology, their largest practice, alone operates roughly 30 offices.
All providers run on ModMed, chosen for its dermatology-specific pathology, inventory, and clinical workflows. The organization is on an active acquisition path, rolling up additional dermatology practices — which puts a premium on infrastructure that scales cleanly across new sites. After cycling through in-house IT and then an outsourced provider that fell behind on basics, leadership needed a partner who could keep a geographically distributed, growth-stage practice running.
Given your existing knowledge of our data and your understanding of our business, the decision was straightforward. Your specialization in healthcare, paired with a highly regarded IT division, made partnering with you the most natural and confident choice we could make.
DAVID PHILLIPS
Corporate Development & FP&A Manager
The Challenge
An outsourced IT vendor that stopped delivering
Skin & Aesthetic Centers originally ran IT in-house, but a single internal resource couldn’t realistically support a practice spread across four states. Leadership outsourced to a third-party MSP — which was acquired shortly after by CBiz — and service quality fell off sharply. Firewall breaches sat unpatched.
Routine tickets stalled. With 58 providers across 39 locations all running on ModMed, every unresolved IT issue translated directly into clinical downtime; a locked-out provider is a provider who can’t see patients. The previous vendor was a generalist MSP with no healthcare specialization, and it showed in their response times and their response times and their grasp of what was urgent in a clinical environment.
What had to be solved
- Unpatched security gaps. Firewall breaches were identified but not remediated. For a multi-state practice handling PHI under HIPAA, an MSP that doesn’t patch known vulnerabilities isn’t a service issue. It’s an exposure issue. Every day those gaps stayed open, the risk to the organization grew.
- Clinical downtime from slow tickets. Provider lockouts that look two weeks to resolve. In a clinic, that’s lost appointments, rescheduled patients, and front-desk workarounds — every day until the ticket finally got worked.
- No healthcare context. The previous vendor wasn’t a healthcare MSP. They didn’t understand ModMed, HIPAA prioritiesm or that a provider workstation outage is patient-care event — not a help-desk ticket triage on Friday.
- Hard to scale with acquisitions. With a new practices being acquired and rolled in. IT needed to onboard locations cleanly and quickly, A vendor that couldn’t keep up with the existing footprint was never going to support the growth pipeline.
Simple issues — like a provider being locked out of their computer — could take up to two weeks to resolve. That level of support was not meeting the terms of our contract, and it became clear that we needed a more reliable solution.
DAVID PHILLIPS
Corporate Development Manager
How we approached it
Already inside the business — and built for healthcare
Focus had already executed Skin & Aesthetic Centers’ ModMed data conversion in 2021/2022 and stood up their insights analytics platform. When the previous IT provider’s service degraded, David Phillips ran a formal evaluation against five or six other MSPs before consolidating IT with Focus in 2026.
Three factors set Focus apart from the generalist MSPs in the evaluation: (1) an existing working relationship and operational understanding of the business from the data and analytics side, (2) deep healthcare specialization — none of the other vendors evaluated were healthcare-focused, and (3) a strong reputation specifically on the managed IT side. The result was the obvious choice on the shortlist.
From there, we followed a clear path
- Took ownership of the environment. Focus assumed responsibility for the full IT stack across all 39 locations, with David heading the transition directly. The cutover was, in his words, “seamless” — any hiccups that surfaced were resolved quickly.
- Standardized infrastructure across sites. Brought consistent hardware, firewall, and security baselines to all 39 offices, replacing the patchwork left by the prior vendor and closing the security gaps that had been flagged but never remediated.
- Built proactive communication. Set up a cadence where any planned interruptions are emailed out the morning of, so practice managers and providers aren’t caught off guard. Issues are surfaced and resolved before they become David’s problem.
- Integrated with Focus’s healthcare ecosystem. Connected the IT stack to the same team already running data conversion, insights analytics, and the security tooling — so device management, patching, and endpoint security all sit with one accountable partner.
With data ingestion and structuring handled behind the scenes, I’m free to focus on what I do best. That means on the front end, I have the flexibility and capability to build exactly what this business needs to operate effectively.
DAVID PHILLIPS
Corporate Development & FP&A Manager
What we built together
One healthcare-focused IT partner across the entire footprint
Focus now provides fully managed IT for Skin & Aesthetic Centers — covering infrastructure, endpoint security, help desk, and proactive change management across all 39 locations and 58 providers — sitting alongside the data conversion and insights platform Focus already operates for the group.
What we delivered
- Single accountable partner for all IT. Instead of one internal admin or a generalist MSP trying to cover four states, IT runs through Focus’s healthcare-specialized team — with Will on software and a dedicated rep relationship that keeps David’s team out of the day-to-day weeds.
- Standardized security across all endpoints. Focus is installing security tooling on every provider workstation, replacing the unpatched, ad-hoc setup that came over from the previous MSP. One controlled baseline instead of 39.
- Healthcare-aware help desk. Tickets are worked by a team that knows ModMed, knows what clinical downtime costs, and triages accordingly. No more two-week lockouts while a generalist queue gets to it. When a provider workstation goes down, the team treats it like what it is: a patient care event. That changes how fast it gets picked up and who handles it.
- Proactive maintenance & change comms. Updates, patches, and any planned interruptions are communicated to the business in advance via morning-of email notifications, so practice operations can plan around them. No surprise reboots mid-clinic. If it’s planned, the practice knows ahead of time. If it’s urgent, the team is already on it.
The Results
A stable IT foundation built for a growing dermatology MSO
Provider lockouts and ticket turnaround that used to stretch to two weeks under the previous MSP are now resolved quickly — and security gaps that had been left unpatched are being closed across all 39 locations.
With data, analytics, and IT all running through one healthcare-focused partner, Skin & Aesthetic Centers’ leadership can stay focused on what’s next — acquiring practices, growing the platform, and serving patients — instead of chasing tickets.
The operational shift
- Seamless transition off a falling vendor. David worked directly with Focus on the migration, and the cutover went smoothly, even across four states. A few things came up. They got handled fast. That alone was a noticeable shift from what the practice had been dealing with. No drawn-out timelines, no finger-pointing between vendors. Just a clean handoff and a team that followed through.
- Providers stay working, not waiting. Faster issue resolution means providers stay in front of patients instead of locked out of their workstations, and know-issue patching happens on a schedule instead of a hope.
- A scalable foundation for the acquisition pipeline. With Focus already handling data, analytics, and now IT, leadership has one accountable partner that grows with the platform — important of an MSO actively rolling up additional dermatology practices.
Running a multi-location practice? Let’s talk about your IT.
If you’re running a multi-state, multi-location healthcare practice and your current MSP doesn’t understand your EHR, your clinical workflows, or your acquisition pipeline — we should talk.
