Idaho Code ch. 39-45 — The Medical Consent and Natural Death Act · Idaho
Idaho: how to sign your advance directive
Idaho's chapter is titled The Medical Consent and Natural Death Act, and the document it governs is not called a living will. §39-4502(1) offers four interchangeable terms — "Advance care planning document," "advance directive," "directive," or "health care directive" — and defines them to cover any document that substantially meets §39-4510(1), or a POST form, or "another document that represents a competent person's authentic expression of such person's wishes concerning health care services."
Why WearableDocs
Wherever you are, the directive has to be reachable
A signed advance directive that cannot be produced when someone asks for it fails in practice. WearableDocs stores yours and makes it open in seconds from a card you already carry.
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 Idaho asks
What you need to sign in Idaho
- Instruments
- An advance care planning document — the chapter's umbrella term, which the Department describes as two parts: a durable power of attorney for healthcare and a living will. A POST form is also an advance directive by definition (§39-4502(1)(b))
- Form
- Illustrative — §39-4502(1)(c) treats "another document that represents a competent person's authentic expression of such person's wishes concerning health care services" as an advance directive
- Execution
- Signature alone — no witness, no notary (§39-4510(1), the execution requirement referred to at §39-4502(1)(a)). The Department of Health and Welfare: the directive "must be signed by you and does not need to be notarized or signed by a medical provider"
- May not witness
- None — no witness is required, so no disqualification rule is engaged in the captured sections
- Trigger overridable
- Yes. §39-4504(1)(b) gives the person named as health care agent priority in the consent order "if the conditions in such advance care planning document for authorizing the agent to act have been satisfied" — the document sets its own conditions
- Registry
- Yes — the Idaho Healthcare Directive Registry, run by the Department of Health and Welfare (transferred from the Secretary of State). It is a cloud-based system that lets a resident "upload, create and/or share" the document
- Carried device
- A POST identification device is defined — it represents a POST form with a DNR choice (§39-4502(19)). Nothing for the directive. See below
- Citation
- Idaho Code ch. 39-45 — The Medical Consent and Natural Death Act
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Idaho actually recognizes
That definition is wider than most states'. It means the POST form — the physician-signed order about resuscitation — is itself an advance directive in Idaho, sitting alongside the document that names a health care agent and states instructions.
The state's own Department of Health and Welfare describes the advance directive as two parts, a durable power of attorney for healthcare and a living will, and states the execution rule in a sentence: an Idaho advance directive "must be signed by you and does not need to be notarized or signed by a medical provider." Storage runs through the Idaho Healthcare Directive Registry, which the Department took over from the Secretary of State.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Idaho
Idaho defines a carried device, and what it carries is the POST form.
§39-4502(19):
"POST identification device" means jewelry worn around the wrist, neck, or ankle representing that the wearer has a POST form complying with section 39-4512A, Idaho Code, and that such person has chosen "Do Not Resuscitate: Allow Natural Death (No Code/DNR/DNAR): No CPR or advanced cardiac life support interventions" or the equivalent choice.
Idaho's definition of an advance directive is why that device is worth stating precisely: §39-4502(1)(b) counts a POST form as an advance directive, so the object on the wrist represents something the chapter itself calls a directive. But the representation is only as wide as the POST form — the resuscitation order and its DNR choice. It does not carry the agent designation, and it does not carry the treatment instructions in the power of attorney or the living will.
Whether EMS must act on the device is not established here. The compliance provision is outside the captured sections, and absence cannot be asserted — which is the honest position rather than a claim either way.
What the directive itself has is the registry. The Idaho Healthcare Directive Registry is the mechanism the state publishes for making the document available when it is needed, and it is the reason an Idaho directive does not depend on anyone finding paper. And once, plainly: an advance directive does not bind EMS on CPR. The POST form is the instrument that speaks to that.