Death, Taxes and Advance Directives

Death, Taxes and Advance Directives

N.M. Wood1; J.D. D'Amore2; S.L. Jones3; D.F. Sittig4; R.B. Ness1 1University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, Texas, United States; 2Diameter Health, Newton, Massachusetts, United States; 3Houston Methodist Hospital, Surgery, Houston, Texas, United States; 4University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics and the UT-Memorial Hermann Center for Healthcare Quality & Safety, Houston,...

Death, taxes and advance directives.

Suboptimal care at the end-of-life can be due to lack of access or knowledge of patient wishes. Ambiguity is often the result of non-standardized formats. Borrowing digital technology from other industries and using existing health information infrastructure can greatly improve the completion, storage, and distribution of advance directives. We believe several simple, low-cost adaptations to re...

Dementia, death and advance directives.

This article considers the ethics of advance directives, especially in relation to conditions such as dementia. For some choices, such as over whether one's life should end at home or in a hospice, advance directives can be very enlightened and helpful. For others, such as those to end the life of an autonomous subject, against their will, have no moral appeal and would rightly be ignored. In a...

[Death, dignity and advance directives].

Advance directives and outcomes of surrogate decision making before death.

BACKGROUND Recent discussions about health care reform have raised questions regarding the value of advance directives. METHODS We used data from survey proxies in the Health and Retirement Study involving adults 60 years of age or older who had died between 2000 and 2006 to determine the prevalence of the need for decision making and lost decision-making capacity and to test the association ...