Consumers Aren't Waiting — And the Market Outside Your Walls Is Moving Faster Than You Are

At HealthSpaces, Dan Stanek, EVP, Leader of Health + Wellness Practice with WD Partners, showed something striking: within a mile of his house, a strip mall now houses cryotherapy, medical weight loss, IV therapy, a longevity clinic, and an Orange Theory. All in 3,000–4,000 sq ft storefronts with simple buildouts — and all capturing a market traditional health systems barely touch. It's part of a broader shift he described as "proactive health," and it's reshaping where consumers go long before they ever enter a hospital or clinic.

Why Construction Leaders Should Care

They aren't doing acute care, but they are capturing a growing share of consumer demand — in small, simple storefront spaces that traditional health systems often overlook.

Almost half of consumers now see themselves as proactive about their health. And while this demand has accelerated, trust in the healthcare system has fallen sharply — from 71% in 2020 to 40% in 2024, according to a study he cited. That trust isn't disappearing; it's shifting toward personal stories, influencers, and environments outside traditional care.

There's an internal dynamic too. As Stanek put it, "Your providers are really not comfortable in this realm. They don't like to talk about it." Construction and design leaders often sit between rising consumer demand and clinical partners who may be hesitant to engage with preventative or wellness-oriented services. It complicates planning — but the shift is already underway.

Wellness isn't fringe. According to KPMG, it's now the largest part of the healthcare economy — larger than traditional sick care — and driven almost entirely by consumer choice.

The Facility Implications Are Real

1. Ambulatory Design & Flexibility
   Proactive care evolves quickly — new diagnostics, new monitoring tools, new membership-based services. Outpatient facilities designed today need to flex with that pace or risk costly renovations in just a few years.
2. "Lifestyle Health" Space Requirements
   Food-as-medicine programming. Fitness-focused spaces. Coaching. Baseline diagnostics.
   These aren't ORs or imaging suites, but they still require intentional square footage, smarter adjacencies, and flow that supports regular, repeat visits. He also noted that gyms are becoming clinics — offering testing, consults, biomarker tracking, and personalized pathways under one roof. That's a clear signal: consumers are comfortable receiving "clinical-adjacent" support in environments far more informal than a medical campus.
3. The Wave of Testing + Continuous Monitoring
   Genetic testing, bloodwork, preventive MRIs, smart pills, ingestibles, embeddables, wearables — consumers are paying for all of it out of pocket, and using it to track health over time. This raises strategic questions for facilities: Do you design spaces that can support these services? Partner with others? Or simply ensure your footprint is flexible enough to adapt as strategy evolves?
4. Location Strategy
   Proactive care thrives on convenience. Strip centers work because that's where people already are. In his own neighborhood, a single center now functions like a micro–health ecosystem. If frequency matters, the off-campus location strategy will need to evolve alongside it.
5. Designing for Long-Term Engagement
   Preventive health is recurring and relationship-based. That changes everything from parking assumptions, waiting room purpose, exam room utilization, digital infrastructure, throughput patterns, and the emotional tone of the space. Facilities either signal "come here often" or "only come here when you’re sick.”

The Bottom Line

A parallel health ecosystem is growing quickly outside traditional facilities — one built on convenience, recurring engagement, simple spaces, and rising consumer trust. People are paying out of pocket for testing, monitoring, and preventative services long before they ever encounter a health system’s front door.

The opportunity isn’t to mirror medtail. It’s to ensure the facilities you’re planning today can support a broader shift toward proactive, preventive, consumer-aligned care if your system chooses to go that way.

Consumers have already moved. The real question is whether your capital and design strategy are equipped to keep pace with them.

Watch his full talk below...