Ind. Code 16-36-7 · 16-36-4 · 30-5-5-16(e) · Indiana
Indiana: how to sign your advance directive
Indiana is the state where the document that looks right is the one that does nothing.
Why WearableDocs
In Indiana, 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 Indiana asks
What you need to sign in Indiana
- Instruments
- Health care representative (IC 16-36-7) appoints your agent. Living will / life-prolonging declaration (IC 16-36-4) states your instructions and is still live
- Form
- Declaration substantially mandatory; the IC 16-36-7 advance directive illustrative
- Execution
- Declaration: two witnesses OR a notary. IC 16-36-7 advance directive: two witnesses OR a notarial officer (§28)
- May not witness
- Declaration: whoever signed on your behalf; your parent, spouse or child; an estate beneficiary; whoever is financially responsible for you. IC 16-36-7 witness rules: see §28 — at least one witness must not be a spouse or relative, and remote and even telephonic witnessing are permitted under defined conditions
- May not be your agent
- See IC 16-36-7 §§20–21, 34, 36
- Copy rule
- None
- Delivery
- No — the directive does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate. Conflict rule at §44 — where instruments conflict, the last-signed controls, including against pre-2023 IC 16-36-1 and IC 30-5 instruments
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive
- Citation
- Ind. Code 16-36-7 · 16-36-4 · 30-5-5-16(e)
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Indiana actually recognizes
For years, Hoosiers appointed a health care agent through a health care power of attorney under IC 30-5-5. That chapter still exists. It still reads like a health care POA statute. Forms built from it still circulate, and they still pass every formal check — right parties, right powers, right signature block.
It cannot be used for health care any more. IC 30-5-5-16(e): a document granting health care powers "may not be executed under this chapter after December 31, 2022," and if you do it anyway, "the health care powers are void, but all other powers … remain effective."
The live instrument is the health care representative under IC 16-36-7, which Indiana enacted to replace it. Alongside that, IC 16-36-4 still governs living wills and life-prolonging declarations, and those remain valid.
So Indiana has two instruments and one trap. The trap is silent: a post-2022 IC 30-5-5 health care POA is not rejected, not flagged, and not obviously defective. It simply confers no health care authority at all.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Indiana
"Use an Indiana health care power of attorney." This is the single most consequential correction in the cluster. Since 31 December 2022, a document granting health care powers under IC 30-5-5 is void as to health care. The statute's own words: "the health care powers are void, but all other powers … remain effective" — so the document is not blank, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. It will appoint someone to handle your finances while quietly failing to appoint anyone to speak for your care.
"Indiana's HCPOA form is still current." Many are not, and nothing on the page will say so. If an Indiana advance directive form cites IC 30-5-5 for health care authority, it is the wrong instrument. The appointment belongs under IC 16-36-7.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Indiana
Indiana's problem is not that the directive is hard to find. It is that the document a Hoosier is most likely to be carrying may appoint nobody at all. There is no device provision and no copy-equivalence rule in either chapter.
Indiana's relevance to this cluster is not about carrying. It is the clearest demonstration of why this project exists at all: the law moved, the forms did not, and the result looks correct. A Hoosier who downloaded a health care power of attorney in 2021 and signed it in 2023 holds a document that appoints nobody for health care — and no one in the room would know.
That is the same failure the verified_on date exists to catch. It is worth saying plainly on the page, because a reader who has just learned their document is void needs to act, and the card is only useful to them once they have a valid instrument to put behind it.