The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care is a legal document that allows individuals to choose another to make their health care choices if they are unable to do so for themselves.  It is often made in conjunction with another legal document known as an advanced health care directive or living will.  The advanced directive allows your medical team, family, and friends to know what type of choices you would want made for yourself if you were unable to choose for yourself.  These documents allow you to make your wishes known at a time that will be very stressful to your family and friends.  It keeps you in charge and takes the burden off of your family from deciding who should make decisions for you and what decisions should be made for you.

            The healthcare DPOA is a legal document but does not have to be difficult or expensive to obtain.  You can have one made through an attorney.  However, there are many other free or low cost alternatives.  Many hospitals offer DPOA services at no additional charge when people are admitted.  They provide you with a booklet that walks you through the process of filing out a form and then provide withnesses and a notary service to make it legal.  Many websites, including bar associations and state attorney general’s offices, make a preprinted form available at no cost.  The only cost incurred with these is to obtain a notary once the form is completed.

            The following search options were chosen because I found them to have a wide variety of useful and current healthcare related information.  They are either founded or run by reputable professionals or government agencies.  The specific websites were chosen because they gave very specific information about what a DPOA was and how to obtain one.  They are either legal sites or professional sites working to empower others with knowledge of healthcare choices.

OmniMedicalSearch.  OmniMedicalSearch.com is divided into 4 main sections: Search Options, Reference Desk, Conditions & Diseases, and Local Directory.  The search option is broken down into news, images, and forums.  The Reference Desk section was designed and assembled to help the consumer-researcher and medical professional access highly useful tools and hard to find resources.  It includes a dictionary, a health and medical forum directory, medical journals, and a medical image directory.  The local directory is a multi-speciality doctor directory that helps users find specialist doctors, clinics and professionals in their area in the United States and Canada for listed categories.  www.omnimedicalsearch.com

PubMed Central (PMC).  PMC is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.  PMC is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM)  www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/healthfinder.gov

The National Health Information Center  (NHIC) is a health information referral service. NHIC puts health professionals and consumers who have health questions in touch with those organizations that are best able to provide answers. NHIC was established in 1979 by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP), Office of Public Health and Science, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  The Health Information Resource Database includes 1,400 organizations and government offices that provide health information upon request. Entries include contact information, short abstracts, and information about publications and services the organizations provide.  www.health.gov/NHIC/

The Missouri Bar.   The Missouri Bar was created in 1944 by order of the Supreme Court of Missouri. Its mission is to improve the legal profession, the administration of justice, and law. Through educational programs, publications, and more, The Missouri Bar serves as a valuable resource for members and for the citizens of Missouri.  http://www.mobar.org/535a6273-a632-4566-ae96-1443851e3568.aspx

Missouri Attorney General’s Office

Life choices.  The Missouri Attorney General’s Office partnered with the Missouri End-of-Life Coalition to empower Missourians with knowledge about end-of-life issues and to raise awareness about pain and symptom management. This revised edition of Life Choices makes improvements to an already popular publication that has been provided to tens of thousands of Missourians. http://ago.mo.gov/publications/lifechoices/lifechoices.pdf

DPOA Form.  This is a direct link to Durable power of attorney for health care choices and health care choices directive from above with out having to go throught the lifechoices booklet. http://ago.mo.gov/publications/lifechoices/healthcarechoices.pdf

Family Caregiver Alliance.  Family Caregiver Alliance was the first community-based nonprofit organization in the country to address the needs of families and friends providing long-term care at home. Long recognized as a pioneer in health services, FCA now offers programs at national, state and local levels to support and sustain caregivers.  www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid=434

Now as far as health care informatics are concerned, I also learned a truck load.  I did a simple search and found way more hits than I really wanted to.  I even learned that there are universities that have entire degree programs in healthcare informatics.  How did I not know more about this?  In short informatics is about integrating technology into health care and how we provide care and services to our patients.  It’s everything I learned to use at work but never understood fell into this category.  It’s the programs we use to pass meds, to look up drug information, disease information, patient teaching, etc.  It is the program that we now use to chart, the computers that store all our patient information.  It is huge and I never saw how it impacted my world!  I feel like a bird with my head in the sand.