William Ray Moore Endowed Chair

    of Family Medicine and Medical Humanism

    at the University of Louisville

    and Professor of Family and Geriatric Medicine

                                          Faculty Vita 

David John Doukas, MD is the William Ray Moore Endowed Chair of Family Medicine and Medical Humanism at the University of Louisville, and Professor of Family and Geriatric Medicine. Prior toaccepting his current responsibilities, Professor Doukas served on the faculty of the Georgetown University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania, teaching and writing in the areas of professionalism, primary care bioethics, human genetics, and end-of-life decision-making. He is interested in understanding the ethical implications of value judgments that patients and physicians use in the informed consent process, and has written on the need to better understand the ethical obligations of physicians in working with families with an emphasis on better articulating the boundaries of the physician-family relationship. He is the author of the concept termed the family covenant (1991), a health care agreement between a health provider and entire family that sets out to address proactively issues revolving around individual and family claims to medical information. He is the co-developer and author of the Values History (1988) with Laurence McCullough, Ph.D., as a method for eliciting the values and advance directives of patients toward life-prolonging care. The Values History has been widely cited as a valuable model for identifying relevant patient values important in end-of-life care decision-making. He co-authored the book, Planning for Uncertainty (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) with William Reichel, M.D., which examines the evaluation of patient values and their relevance to advance directive selection.

Professor Doukas' degrees include a B.A. in Biology and Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and an M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine. After his Family Practice residency (University of Kentucky), he completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Bioethics (1986-87) at the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.