David John Doukas

David John Doukas, MD (born 4 November 1957, Washington, DC), is an American family physician and bioethicist. He holds the William Ray Moore Endowed Chair of Family Medicine and Medical Humanism, the Director of the Division of Medical Humanism and Ethics, a Professor in the Department of Family and Geriatric Medicine, and co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Bioethics Program at the University of Louisville. Doukas is Founding President of the Academy for Professionalism in Health Care.

Doukas holds degrees in Biology and Religious Studies (B.A.) from the University of Virginia and an M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine. After completing a Family Practice internship at UCLA and residency st the University of Kentucky, he completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Bioethics (1986–87) at the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics of Georgetown University . He previously has served on the faculties of Georgetown University (1987-1989), the University of Michigan (1989-1999), and the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2004). He joined the faculty of the University of Louisville in the summer of 2004.

His scholarship focuses on the areas of professionalism, primary care bioethics, genetics, and end-of-life care decision-making. He is the originator 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. Doukas and others subsequently applied the family covenant to genetic and end-of-life ethical circumstances. He is the co-developer and author of the Values History (1988) with Laurence McCullough as a method for eliciting the values and advance directives of patients toward life-prolonging care, that has been widely cited as a valuable means to enhance the process of 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, 2nd edition 2007) with William Reichel, M.D., which examines the evaluation of patient values and their relevance to advance directive selection. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 734 libraries.