The questions medspa owners ask are different from what salon owners ask. The concerns are more clinical: patient data, HIPAA exposure, what happens to five years of treatment records. These answers are based on what we see in practice working with medspa owners who are evaluating a switch from Mindbody. For the bigger picture, start with our medspa overview.
Medspa owners switching from Mindbody mostly ask about HIPAA, charting, and records. Mindbody signs a BAA and has SOAP and progress notes, but no medspa charting, so most medspas run a second system such as Aesthetic Record, Jane App, or PatientNow and reconcile it with Mindbody every morning. Boulevard's HIPAA charting, included on every Aesthetics plan, covers treatment notes, consent forms, photos, and provider sign-off, but not ICD-10 coding or insurance billing; e-prescribing is a $45-per-prescriber add-on. A Mindbody-to-Boulevard medspa migration takes 4–6 weeks.
Mindbody will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), but per its support documentation the BAA covers its HIPAA-enabled SOAP and progress notes, not the whole platform or third-party integrations. The HIPAA exposure for most medspas is in how treatment notes are stored (often in a second system that may not have its own BAA), how before/after photos travel between staff (often via personal phones and text), and how patient data moves between Mindbody and the EMR running alongside it.
A BAA with Mindbody covers specific Mindbody features. It doesn't mean your practice's overall workflows are compliant.
Not for medspa work. Mindbody has SOAP and progress notes, but no medspa charting: no injection mapping, no photo markup, and no provider sign-off, in Grove's assessment. Most medspas run a second system alongside Mindbody, most often Aesthetic Record, Jane App, or PatientNow, and a staff member reconciles the two every morning. Owners describe that reconciliation as 45 minutes of work before the first patient walks in.
The two-system setup works, but it creates a synchronization problem that shows up every day: a staff member opens both systems at the start of the morning and makes sure they match.
Platforms like Boulevard, PatientNow, and Aesthetic Record are designed to close this gap: clinical documentation is native, not an integration into a third party. The difference in daily friction is significant.
Mindbody has API-based connections with some EMR systems, but none of these integrations are native in the way medspa owners need. The connections mainly sync appointment data, not clinical documentation, and they need technical setup plus ongoing attention whenever either platform updates. In practice, most medspas run Mindbody for scheduling and a separate system for charting, with a staff member manually confirming each morning that appointment and patient records match.
That morning check is what most medspas call a "Mindbody-EMR integration": a manual process between two systems that depends on whoever does it not making a mistake.
Platforms built specifically for aesthetic medicine (Boulevard, Aesthetic Record, PatientNow) are designed so the scheduling and clinical documentation live in the same system, removing the transfer problem rather than trying to automate around it.
Most do it outside the platform entirely, because Mindbody has no native photo gallery for clinical use. The patterns we see most often: photos taken on a personal iPhone, sent to a group text or email thread, then downloaded into a shared Google Drive or Dropbox folder organized by client name. Some practices use a dedicated aesthetic photo app alongside Mindbody as a third system.
Each step in that chain has HIPAA implications that most practice owners haven't mapped. Before/after photos are Protected Health Information: they contain the patient's likeness, the date of the treatment, the condition being addressed, and in many cases the treatment administered. The image file itself is PHI.
The reason NPs and APRNs reviewing Boulevard specifically called out the photo gallery in their reviews is that it eliminates this workflow entirely. Photos are taken, stored, and attached to the client record inside the platform, in a HIPAA-covered system, without ever touching a personal device or traveling through an external channel for standard workflows.
For most aesthetic medspas: yes. Boulevard's HIPAA-compliant charting covers treatment notes, consent forms, medication records, patient health history, provider sign-off, and before/after photos. For practices currently running Mindbody plus Aesthetic Record, Jane App, or a similar clinical documentation tool, Boulevard's platform consolidates both into one system and eliminates the daily synchronization work.
The exception is real, and worth naming directly: practices with complex medical record needs that go beyond aesthetic documentation. Plastic surgery-adjacent medspas, practices with heavy MD oversight across every treatment type, and practices that need ICD-10 coding integration or insurance billing workflows are in a different category. For those, a purpose-built clinical system (PatientNow, or a full healthcare EMR) is still the right infrastructure for the clinical side. Boulevard handles scheduling and the client experience layer; it's not designed to be Epic.
For the full cost and feature breakdown side by side, see our Mindbody vs Boulevard comparison for medspas, or the five-platform alternatives roundup if you're still weighing options beyond Boulevard.
Boulevard's HIPAA charting includes treatment notes (freeform and templated), digital consent forms, a before/after photo gallery attached to the appointment and client, patient health history intake forms, medication and allergy records, a provider sign-off workflow for MD review of NP/APRN notes, and SOAP note formatting. It's included on every Aesthetics plan. It does not include ICD-10 or CPT coding, insurance billing or claims management, or full EMR-level clinical decision support; e-prescribing is a separate add-on at $45 per prescriber.
The features most relevant to aesthetic practice documentation:
What it doesn't include, and what to be clear-eyed about before committing:
E-prescribing is available as a separate add-on at $45 per prescriber.
Boulevard is designed for aesthetic medicine documentation: the records, photos, consents, and provider workflow that a medspa generates in the course of running appointments. It's not designed for general medical practice management, and it doesn't try to be.
A medspa migration from Mindbody to Boulevard takes 4–6 weeks from decision to go-live: weeks 1–2 for Boulevard setup and clinical configuration (charting templates, consent forms, room assignments, provider permissions), week 3 for data migration from the Mindbody export, week 4 for staff training with both systems running in parallel, week 5 for go-live, and week 6 as a buffer. Medspa migrations take longer than salon migrations because of the clinical configuration layer.
Patient records move in two separate processes. The Mindbody side (appointment history, client contact data, gift card balances, active packages) comes out through Mindbody's free CSV exports or its paid export service (price unpublished; owners and vendors report about $499). Clinical records (treatment notes, charting, consent forms, before/after photos) need a separate export from the system that holds them, such as Aesthetic Record, Jane App, or PatientNow. Most medspas archive clinical records as PDFs and re-enter history for active patients.
The Mindbody side (appointment history, client contact data, gift card balances, active packages) transfers through the Mindbody data export process. Mindbody's free self-serve CSV exports cover client contact info, purchase history, memberships, and visit records. Its paid data export service costs extra; Mindbody doesn't publish the price, and owners and migration vendors report about $499. We'll tell you upfront which route fits your timing and setup; the actual transfer is handled by the receiving platform's team, not by us.
The clinical records side (treatment notes, charting, consent forms, before/after photos) lives in whatever system you've been using alongside Mindbody. Aesthetic Record, Jane App, PatientNow, or a custom setup. That export is a separate process, from that system, and it's not part of the Mindbody export at all.
What this looks like in practice: most medspas export their clinical records as PDFs and maintain them in a secure, HIPAA-compliant archive. For high-value active patients (anyone with ongoing treatment plans or recent records that providers will need during appointments), some practices re-enter that history into Boulevard's charting system before go-live.
Yes. Boulevard's resource scheduling handles room assignment and provider scheduling for IV therapy, injection appointments, and other time-and-room-specific treatments. You configure treatment room capacity, assign specific providers to specific rooms, and set service-specific timing for how long each treatment occupies a chair, so a 90-minute IV infusion blocks the chair for 90 minutes for that provider.
In day-to-day scheduling, resource conflicts (two appointments both assigned to the same treatment room) surface in the scheduling view before they become an operational problem. Double-booking a laser suite shows up immediately rather than at the start of the appointment.
The configuration requires attention to set up correctly. Each treatment type needs to be mapped to the resources it uses: room type, equipment, whether a provider needs to be present continuously or just for specific phases. This is part of the setup work in weeks one and two of the migration. Once configured, the schedule reflects how the practice actually operates rather than requiring staff to manually track resource availability alongside the booking system.
Ask Boulevard to show the clinical layer, because the standard demo covers the scheduling calendar, the client profile, and a few marketing features. Five questions surface what a medspa needs to see: how a Botox appointment is charted through provider sign-off, how photos attach to a specific appointment, whether the implementation contact has medspa experience, whether there's a fee to export data if you leave, and how resource scheduling works for a two-chair IV therapy suite.
"Can you walk me through charting a botox appointment, from injection notes to provider sign-off?"
This shows you whether the clinical workflow is actually built for aesthetics or whether it's a generic note-taking layer with an aesthetic skin on top. The path from NP's injection notes to MD review sign-off should take under two minutes in a well-configured system.
"How does the photo gallery attach photos to a specific appointment versus just a client record?"
If your providers need to compare before/after photos across specific treatment visits (which most do), the attachment needs to be appointment-specific, not just client-level. A photo attached to the client record only is harder to use in a clinical context.
"Who's my implementation contact, and do they have medspa experience specifically?"
Boulevard's onboarding quality varies by implementation lead. An implementation contact with salon experience and no medspa background will set up the scheduling correctly and miss the clinical configuration entirely. Ask before you're assigned.
"What happens to my data if I leave Boulevard, and is there a fee to export it?"
Good platforms answer this immediately and directly. If the answer is hedged, ask again. For reference: Mindbody doesn't publish the price of its paid data export service, which is the kind of answer worth getting in writing before you sign.
"Can you show me how resource scheduling works for a two-chair IV therapy suite?"
If IV therapy is part of your service menu, see it in the demo, not just described. The configuration should make sense visually. If the demo contact isn't sure how to show it, that tells you something about their medspa implementation experience.
Medspa evaluations take longer than salon evaluations because the clinical layer adds complexity: what you're charting, where it currently lives, what the HIPAA exposure looks like, what happens to five years of patient records. The free assessment walks through your specific setup in about two minutes.
Grove only gets paid when a business switches through us to Boulevard. If Boulevard isn't the right fit for your clinical needs, we'll tell you that in the assessment, not after you've already started the process.
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Want to talk it through instead? Start with the assessment and you'll see the option to book a call after, for $97.