Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a half-dozen bills passed during the 2019 legislative session dealing with health care and education at the CSU Health and Medical Center in Fort Collins on May 16, 2019. Shown in the photo above are (from left) Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera; Fort Collins family physician Cory Carroll, MD; Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Northern Colorado IPA President Jan Gillespie, MD; and Sen. Joann Ginal.

The Northern Colorado Medical Society applauds the signing of SB19-073 into law. It creates a statewide system of advance medical directives that allows qualified professionals to upload an individual’s advance health care directive upon his or her request. The directive can contain medical orders for scope of treatment, a declaration as to medical treatment, a directive relating to cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or a medical durable power of attorney.

“This law represents a huge step forward toward helping people have the care that they want at the end of life or when they cannot speak for themselves,” said NCMS Treasurer Jan Gillespie, MD. “NCMS has partnered with SOCI [Systems of Care Initiative, a local 501(c)(3) organization] to provide onsite training to medical providers and their staff to assist them in encouraging and enabling their patients of all ages to complete advance care directives. One of NCMS’s goals is to facilitate a cultural change in our community such that having discussions about end-of-life decisions will be acceptable and even routine.”

NCMS leaders – including Donna Sullivan, MD; Cory Carroll, MD; Gillespie; and Executive Director Maria Medina, EdD – worked on this concept for several years with bill sponsor Sen. Joann Ginal (D-Fort Collins). The NCMS/ACD statewide registry committee held several stakeholder meetings and many informative conversations and listening sessions with Sen. Ginal in 2017 and 2018.

“I believe that the success of this bill had much to do with the preparatory work of the NCMS committee that helped provide education and answers relating to how a statewide registry could come to fruition from the physician perspective, which was one of the senator’s goals,” Medina said. “This was a very important policy effort that NCMS was a part of; the board voted to include advance care directives in our five-year strategic focus and this represents a target achieved.”

The NCMS Board of Directors will soon discuss how to educate northern Colorado physicians on what to do next, how and where to scan in advance directives, where to find the appropriate forms, how to instruct patients to declare they have directives, and other important details.