Submitted by Janice on
Covering Advance Directive documents across jurisdictions
The rules for advance directive documents and which documents are legal vary across different jurisdictions. For example, living wills are not enforceable documents here in Massachusetts but are in other places within the US. There is a healthcare proxy document in Massachusetts that provides the ability to designate someone else to make medical decisions for you if you are temporarily or permanently incapacitated, but that document is not legally binding elsewhere (although other states may choose to honor it and some states offer a similar option under a power of attorney program).
We are concerned that, without more explicit guidance around how to represent advance directives, decisions will be made based on common but not universally adopted types of advanced directives that exclude or make it difficult to support advance directive data or forms required in some jurisdictions but not others.
Submitted by Janice on
Advance Directive as an observation?
We question whether the Observations data group is the correct location for Advance Directive data. We believe it may be more correctly grouped with patient preferences under Goals and Preferences or in its own category (with an eye toward expanding the data in the future to capture specific elements as independent structured data)