Haw. Rev. Stat. ch. 327E ("Uniform Health-Care Decisions Act (Modified)") · Hawaii
Hawaii: how to sign your advance directive
Hawaii has one document with two parts. You do not choose between naming an agent and stating your instructions — the form carries both, Part 1 and Part 2, and the statute calls the result an advance health care directive.
Why WearableDocs
In Hawaii, the directive has to be found
It does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate — but a document no one can produce when asked for is a document that fails in practice. WearableDocs puts the signed directive on a card you carry and a page that opens in seconds, instead of a phone call to whoever might know which drawer.
You answer a few questions — your name, your state, and what you refuse — and WearableDocs builds the directive. Print it, sign it, upload it. Changing your answers later is part of the plan, so nothing is locked in.
What Hawaii asks
What you need to sign in Hawaii
- Instruments
- One form, two parts — instructions and agent. The statute's word for the instructions is individual instruction
- Form
- Illustrative — a form is published and is not mandatory
- Execution
- Two witnesses OR a notary
- May not witness
- A health care provider; a provider's or facility's employee; your agent. One of two witnesses must be unrelated to you and not an heir
- May not be your agent
- A non-relative agent may not own, operate, or be employed by the institution treating you
- Copy rule
- A copy has the same effect as the original (§327E-12)
- Delivery
- No delivery precondition. Because a copy is equivalent, the document is not waiting on delivery to operate
- Trigger overridable
- Yes — the document may set its own trigger
- Registry
- None created by statute. The Document Bank at myhealthdirective.com is a vendor service recommended in state materials, and §327E has no registry section
- Age
- 18
- Oral instructions
- Yes — an individual instruction may be oral
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive. "Advance Directive" may be marked on a driver's licence — a notation, not a document
- Citation
- Haw. Rev. Stat. ch. 327E ("Uniform Health-Care Decisions Act (Modified)") — secondary host, see provenance
Read from the enacted statute, NONE — sec.
The instrument
What Hawaii actually recognizes
The word to notice is individual instruction. Hawaii's statute uses it where most states say "living will," and the difference is not decoration: someone searching Hawaii for a living will form is searching for a phrase the statute does not use.
Hawaii also has a registry that its statute does not create. The Document Bank at myhealthdirective.com is recommended in state materials and used by Hawaii residents, but §327E contains no registry section. It is a service, not a government filing — and the page should not let a reader think the state is holding their document.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Hawaii
"Hawaii has a document bank registry." Repeated often enough that people believe the state holds their directive. The statute creates no registry. §327E has no registry section at all. The Document Bank is a private service that state materials recommend — useful, but not a government filing, and not a substitute for the findability rule below.
"Hawaii driver's licence stations file your directive." They do not, and the state says so directly: "Hawaii drivers' license stations do not file Advanced Directives." The licence can be marked to show you have one. That mark is not the document.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Hawaii
WearableDocs is how your Hawaii advance directive gets found. There is no bracelet, necklace or card provision attached to §327E.
What Hawaii gives you instead is copy-equivalence — "a copy … has the same effect as the original" (§327E-12) — and unusually direct guidance about what to do with it:
"Keep a copy in any easy to find place in your home. (Not in a safe deposit box!!) You could leave a note on the refrigerator…"
That is the state telling you the document is worthless where it is filed and valuable where it is found. The card is the version of that advice that travels with the person, which is the situation the refrigerator note does not cover.