Accuracy of Primary Care and Hospital-Based Physicians' Predictions of Elderly Outpatients' Treatment Preferences With and Without Advance Directives

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Abstract
ADVANCE DIRECTIVES (ADs) were created to ensure patient autonomy at the end of life. Ideally, patients who became decisionally incapacitated in their final weeks and days of life could still "voice" their preferences for medical care through a prerecorded document, known as the living will, or through a preappointed decision maker referred to as a proxy or surrogate decision maker. Autonomy is preserved to the extent that life-sustaining treatment decisions that physicians and family members make on behalf of the patient (based on AD information) are the same decisions that the patient would have made for himself or herself.