The Doctor-of-the-Future Is In: Patient Responses to Disruptive Health-Care Innovations

Big innovations in health care (combined with financial and policy shifts) will create a health-care landscape that changes dramatically in a relatively short period. Of critical, but often overlooked, importance is the response (and acceptance or rejection) of patients to new models of care. This article, first, outlines some of the primary innovations ahead and reviews what consumer theory already can tell us about likely patient responses and, second, serves as a call to action for consumer research that is still needed to understand and facilitate change. We hope this article prompts a new dialogue between medicine and marketing and, ideally, a subsequent push for interdisciplinary research between consumer behavior scholars and a broad array of health-care scholars, including clinicians, population health researchers, medical decision-making scholars, and health-care technologists.