Make Your Health Care Wishes Known - Easily
The New Old Age blogger Paula Span has recently written an immensely helpful piece on new ways each of us can make our health care advance directives known. Her primary focus is on the American Bar Association sponsored smartphone app, My Health Care Wishes.
In addition, she points out others, including My Directives and DocuBank as well as the websites for the State Advance Directive Registries of Arizona, California, North Carolina, and Vermont.
As she says in her post:
"Few things drive an emergency room staff quite as nuts as a patient who has, yes, carefully considered her preferences, designated a health care decision-maker should she become incapacitated, and documented all that information in an advance directive — which is sitting in a locked safe deposit box or stashed in an bureau drawer at home.
But as we’ve discussed before, that’s hardly an uncommon scenario. In fact, the president of the American Bar Association, Jim Silkenat, told me that until recently, his own advance directive wasn’t easily accessible."
Paula goes on to describe several solutions to this problem, including some startups and some state run registries. You can see all of these plus some others related resources in our:
Topic listing: Advance Directives and other medico legal documents.
Read the entire post here.
Last Updated: July 06, 2019.
Written by: John Milford. Posted: May 08, 2014.
John Milford
John opened and served as Executive Director of the San Francisco Towers (CCRC) for over fifteen years after a career in hospital and health care administration. He remains active as the founder of Heritage Consulting for Retirement Living, has supported non-profit work for seniors as Board...
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