Yesterday I said “you might have reasons for choosing different hosts for information that has different levels of sensitivity [or] needs for high-availability access”. Today I happened to run across a company that makes a business out of this:
The DocuBank Emergency Card provides immediate access to your healthcare directives, any time, anywhere they are needed.
DocuBank provides access to the following critical documents: Living Will, Health Care Power of Attorney, HIPAA release, organ donation form, hospital visitation forms, burial instructions and more. DocuBank makes your healthcare directives work.
They give you a card for your wallet that acts as the “discovery service” to get to the documents, and you need to have authorization to see them: either they’re about you, or you’re a healthcare provider who has specially registered to get access to this type of information.
Poking around online, I also just learned about the Washington State Living Will Registry, which seems to function much the same except that it’s run by the state.
I’m glad there’s a choice of providers for healthcare directives in break-glass scenarios — and I’m also glad I don’t have to host such information myself on the computer under my desk. After all, I could never offer myself a service-level agreement that I’d find acceptable…
Great… for those in the US? A ‘HIPAA release’ sounds quite gruesome!
How do I let the guys in the morgue know that I don’t want my eyes
re-used? Do I have to let them know beforehand to allow access
to the data?
All accident and emergency units wherever I might visit?
Is this a good service for … X.gov to take up?
Regards DaveP
Eve
this is neat but there website is seriously lacking any privacy protection or declaration thereof. Exactly how secure is my personal medical info stored with them?
Both the free government service and the private for-pay one seem to lack any details about the privacy protection offered, although you can take a look at what they require for getting access authorization as a medical facility.
Having multiple providers is a great way to get them to compete on privacy and availability assurances. (I’m actually a bit discomfited by the privacy policy on the state site; it notes that all information you enter into the site itself is considered “public record”… And in fact, I wouldn’t want to rely on government sites alone for this sort of service in any case. YMMV, of course!)
Dave, the idea behind DocuBank in particular is to have a high-availability service to get all sorts of documents that give instructions like this. Having just completed a number of estate-planning documents that included checkboxes for what organs are fair game :-), and looking at the wide range of documents this service handles, it would seem to cover lots of gruesome circumstances like this.