Clinical medicine involves continual assessment of new technologies by patient and provider alike. It appears that for a new medical technology to be utilized, both clinician and patient must be favorably disposed to its use. This may be particularly true for patients who are highly suspicious about the benefits of new technology and who have tendencies to view innovation as risky, unfamiliar, threatening, costly, or insufficiently tested. We propose to survey patients in the primary care setting to determine if there are meaningful differences in innovativeness between blacks and whites and between men and women. We will examine the different conceptual domains of the technology adoption process to determine if racial and gender differences are more prominent for specific components of innovativeness. Our project will develop and use a survey intended to classify each patient according to their innovativeness recordings. The survey will measure innovativeness in both medical and non-medical realms. We intend this work to be the basis of further investigations in the role of innovativeness in patient-provider decisions to adopt new technology. We plan to combine assessment of innovativeness in patients with validated measures of innovativeness among providers, as well as comprehensive medical record review to record the actual utilization of technology by survey respondents. Our intent will be to understand the interplay of patient and provider innovativeness, and how it affects the likelihood that patients are among the first (or last) to receive new drugs, devices, or procedures as they become available.
