Stefanie Drozd, MSN, APRN, NP-FPA, DNP-s

Stefanie Drozd, MSN-APRN, is the founder and Lead Nurse Practitioner of Express Med Spa. She opened the practice in downtown Frankfort in May 2020 and now sets the clinical standards, treatment protocols, and safety expectations used at all four Express Med Spa clinics: Frankfort, La Grange, Shorewood, and Mount Greenwood (Chicago). She is an organization level clinician rather than a member of any single clinic roster. The aesthetic nurses who see patients day to day work inside the framework she writes and maintains.

Her career did not begin in aesthetics. It began in 2003, in a hospital, as a Certified Nursing Assistant at Palos Hospital while she was still in nursing school. She had started at Northern Illinois University, decided that a large university was not the right fit, and transferred to the University of St. Francis, living at home with her parents and two sisters while she finished. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2005 and became a Registered Nurse.

She began her nursing career at Loyola University Medical Center, working primarily in oncology, hematology, bone marrow transplant, and women’s health. Those are units where dosing is exact, where a small error is not a small problem, and where a nurse learns to explain difficult information to frightened people without rushing them. While she was there she started graduate school at Loyola University, and in 2010 she graduated as an Adult Health Nurse Practitioner. She practiced in an outpatient cancer center and rounded at several local hospitals until 2019. Her career now runs to more than 20 years of medical experience, most of it earned in hospital medicine before she ever picked up a syringe for cosmetic work.

In 2019 she went back to school again, this time to train in aesthetics, and it was the change her career needed. She did not want to build a large, luxurious med spa. She wanted a practice a working parent could actually get to, priced and scheduled for real life, run by a nurse practitioner who would rather explain a treatment than sell one. Express Med Spa opened in May 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, and grew into four clinics from there. In her own words, care should not feel clinical. It is personal. It is about trust, listening, and helping people feel confident in their own skin.

Her own treatment work centers on injectables and skin. She performs Xeomin and Botox neurotoxin treatments, lip filler augmentation, microneedling, and microneedling with PRP. Each of those begins with a consultation rather than a syringe: what the patient actually wants to change, what a realistic result looks like on their face, what the treatment can and cannot do, and what it costs to maintain over a year rather than on the day. Her approach is conservative dosing and a willingness to say when the honest answer is to wait, to try something less invasive, or to do nothing at all.

As founder her work now reaches well past her own appointment book. She writes and updates the protocols the network treats by, trains and mentors the aesthetic nurses who join it, and reviews the clinical standards each clinic operates under. A patient seen by another Express Med Spa clinician is still being treated inside a framework she set. That is what founder and Lead Nurse Practitioner means in this practice: she is accountable for how care is delivered across the network, not for filling one clinic’s schedule.

Outside the treatment room she presented at the Medical Spa Show in 2022, the American Med Spa Association national conference, and she is a published children’s book author, writing The Feel-Good Squad series. She is currently in the final residency year of her doctoral program (DNP-s). She lives in downtown Frankfort, walks to the shops and restaurants there, travels most weekends, likes fast cars, bikes with her kids, and owns a Great Dane named Jade.

Express Med Spa serves the Chicago south and southwest suburbs from four clinics: Frankfort, La Grange, Shorewood, and Mount Greenwood (Chicago). It is a suburban practice, not a downtown Chicago one. Stefanie Drozd sets the clinical standards at all four, so the same consultation process, the same dosing discipline, and the same safety protocols apply wherever a patient books. The four clinics share one treatment menu and one set of clinical standards, so a patient can be seen at whichever location fits their week without starting over.