For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.

Dr Jing Li joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Dr Robert Tyler Braun, Sophia Kakarala, and Dr Holly G. Prigerson: “How Should Cost-Informed Goals of Care Decisions Be Facilitated at Life’s End?”

Good health care for elders requires acute ethical attention to the role of ageism as a pervasive source of bias.

This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.

To succeed in accountable care organizations, physicians will need to learn to emphasize collaboration rather than authority, keep costs in mind, and encourage patients to plan in advance for palliative care and death.

Physicians need to help surrogate decision makers to make treatment and end-of-life decisions for those with severe neurological damage by proving a realistic prognosis and maintain strong lines of communication.