Patient experience and healthcare relationships
How consumers experience interactions with healthcare professionals and other sources of care and guidance.
Marketing researcher · educator · former healthcare executive
Karen M. Blackwell
Studying consumer behavior across healthcare experiences, systems, information, and technologies.
Research platform
Consumer behavior across the healthcare ecosystem
My work examines how people experience and navigate healthcare across interactions with professionals, organizations, information, digital tools, and emerging technologies.
Healthcare organizations and systems
How consumers navigate healthcare institutions, organizational environments, and complex systems of care.
Healthcare information and technology
How consumers engage with digital health tools, AI-enabled information, and other evolving healthcare technologies.
About Karen
Research shaped by healthcare leadership, education, and practice
Karen M. Blackwell is a marketing researcher, university educator, and former healthcare executive whose work examines consumer behavior across the healthcare ecosystem. As a doctoral researcher in marketing at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, she studies healthcare as a consumer domain encompassing interactions with professionals, organizations, information, digital tools, and emerging technologies.
Her interdisciplinary research interests include patient experience, healthcare decision-making, digital health, AI-enabled health information, healthcare systems, and marketing and public policy. Her scholarship is informed by executive leadership experience in healthcare marketing, strategy, market access, commercialization, and organizational growth.
Karen has also founded and led a research-informed marketing practice, translating consumer insight, data, and strategy into practical organizational decisions. Across multiple California State University campuses, she connects marketing theory with applied decision-making, inclusive course design, and students’ professional development.
Flagship research program
The problem
Medical dismissal is widely discussed but inconsistently defined and measured.
The research focus
Develop a rigorous approach to studying patient-perceived medical dismissal as a distinct healthcare experience.
The potential contribution
Advance research in consumer behavior, healthcare quality, patient experience, and public policy.
Current stage: Active doctoral research
Current flagship research
Medical dismissal
Developing a rigorous approach to studying patient-perceived medical dismissal as a distinct healthcare experience.
This doctoral research seeks to clarify a patient experience that is widely discussed but inconsistently defined and measured. Public materials focus on the research problem, its significance, and its interdisciplinary relevance while protecting unpublished theory, instrument development, and study design.
- Consumer behavior and patient-experience perspective
- Healthcare and public-policy relevance
- Rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship
Partnership value
What I bring to collaborative work
Research partnerships benefit from more than a strong question. I bring academic preparation, healthcare fluency, executive experience, and a record of translating complex ideas for varied audiences.
Grant-ready thinking
A socially meaningful research platform, external recognition, and experience communicating across academic and applied audiences.
Healthcare and organizational fluency
Former executive leadership across healthcare marketing, market access, payer relationships, value-based care, and digital health.
Translation and engagement
Experience teaching, presenting, facilitating, and developing clear frameworks for scholarly, organizational, and public audiences.
Selected evidence
Research momentum and teaching impact
AMAFAmerican Marketing Association FoundationValuing Diversity PhD Scholarship
CDIPCalifornia State University Office of the ChancellorChancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Fellow
4.94/5CSULA overall teaching effectiveness, Spring 2026
Recent updates
Selected milestones
July 2026
American Marketing Association Foundation Scholarship
Recognized through the Valuing Diversity PhD Scholarship for doctoral research on consumer behavior across healthcare experiences, systems, information, and technologies.
June 2026
CSU CDIP Fellowship
Selected for the 2026–27 cohort based on scholarly promise and potential as a future faculty member.
June 2026
Quality Matters Preparatory Review
MKT 3210: Personal Selling met expectations in a QM-Managed Preparatory Review after the amendment process.
Start a conversation
Research grows through the right connections.
I welcome conversations about grants, datasets, populations, healthcare settings, methodological expertise, coauthorship, invited presentations, and faculty opportunities.