Do Physicians Have a Duty to Support Secondary Use of Clinical Data in Biomedical Research? An Inquiry into the Professional Ethics of Physicians.

Secondary use of clinical data in research or learning activities ( SeConts ) has the potential to improve patient care and biomedical knowledge. Given this potential, the ethical question arises whether physicians have a professional duty to support SeConts . To investigate this question, we analyze prominent international declarations on physicians' professional ethics to determine whether they include duties that can be considered as good reasons for a physicians' professional duty to support SeConts . Next, we examine these documents to identify professional duties that might conflict with a potential duty of physicians to support SeConts .