Mental Health America of Virginia The voice of reason in mental health advocacy

Once you have creating a psychiatric advance directive, medical advance directive or medical power of attorney it is extremely important to distribute your document to the appropriate people and institutions. Where you store your advance directives can be just as critical as preparing one in the first place. There are many places you can keep copies (or originals) of the documents, but there are a few important factors to consider when deciding where to store:

* They must be portable; they can be available wherever you are in the world.
* They must be available in a timely manner.
* They must be in a safe place, protected from theft, fire, flood or other natural disasters.

Although your first priority should be destributing documents to family members and medical providors, a powerful way of maximizing your advance directive's effectiveness is fileing documents with an online database. This is the option we will be exploring in this tutorial.

I will help you set up a Google Health account, store your advance directive documents online and select institutions and databases for distribution from your Google Health account.

NEXT - Creating a Google Account

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