An empirical approach to informed consent in ovarian cancer.

The study was designed to define and compare the professional and the reasonable-person standards for provision of information to ovarian cancer patients, and to determine if patient information priorities could be anticipated by surrogate patients. Physicians treating ovarian cancer patients, women treated for the disease, and well lay women imagining themselves to have the disease used a visual analog scale to judge the importance of 57 questions that they might want answered before treatment decisions are made. On the basis of median importance scores, all groups judged questions relating to life expectancy as most important. Overall, judgments of the patient groups agreed well with one another; doctor-patient agreement was significant but smaller than between-patient agreement. Predicting an individual's judgments from his/her group, however, was very poor for all groups. Life experience and demographic characteristics rarely improved our ability to predict an individual's judgments.