Urgent Care
| Author | Amanda Robert |
| Pages | 66-67 |
66 || ABA JOURNAL JULY-AUGUST 2019
Your ABA
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARA WADFORD/SHUTTERSTOCK
Your ABA
Urgent Care
It was Barbara Keller’s experiences in elder law and
caretaking for her parents that inspired her to develop
the Mind Your Loved Ones app.
Keller, the senior partner at the Keller Legal Group
in New York City, helps pro bono clients of the City Bar
Justice Center’s cancer advocacy and elder law proj-
ects with their advance care directives. These include
legal documents such as living wills that allow them to
express their wishes for health care in case they are later
incapacitated.
Keller needed quick access to her own family’s
advance care directives when called in an emergency sit-
uation, when helping them in the hospital and in a reha-
bilitation center, and in figuring out how to set up home
care.
She also saw several clients and their family members
walk into hospitals with shopping bags full of critical
information and realized they needed a more practical
storage spot. She understood the importance of properly
organizing that information.
“The idea of the app was really that simple,” she says.
“It’s to ensure that vital information that aects critical
health care decisions is controlled by the individual or
by their loved ones and is readily accessible at the right
time and the right place.
“Most people leave the information at home or in a
drawer or somewhere, but there is no better place than
to have it on your phone.”
Mind Your Loved Ones, a mobile app sponsored by
the ABA and ocially launched in May, allows users
to create customized profiles for each member of their
family, including their pets. Each profile contains not
ABA-sponsored app helps families access
advance directives and medical information
By Amanda Robert
only their advance care directives, but also other impor-
tant medical information.
The data is stored locally on each user’s smartphone
but can be backed up in a Dropbox or iCloud account
and emailed, faxed or printed. Mind Your Loved Ones
can only access a user’s name and email address and
none of his or her private information.
“It is truly saving people’s lives to have the informa-
tion at your fingertips when you’re able to tell the hos-
pital that a parent can or can’t take an MRI, or they can
drink a certain contrast or can’t drink a certain contrast,”
Keller says. “These are such simple pieces of information,
but you would be surprised how many of us don’t know
the answers.”
WEALTH OF INFORMATION
The ABA Commission on Law and Aging’s first foray
into storing and sharing advance care directives came in
2014 with its introduction of the My Health Care Wishes
app.
When the ABA stopped distributing the app, Keller
contacted the commission and bought the rights in 2017.
She brokered a new relationship with the ABA and made
plans to expand the app to cover more aspects of health
care.
Jennifer VanderVeen is an elder law attorney with
Tuesley Hall Konopa in South Bend, Indiana, and presi-
dent of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.
She used My Health Care Wishes. So did her family, cli-
ents and colleagues.
The app was particularly helpful when her father was
caring for her grandmother, and he used it to email his
copy of her advance care directive to a physician when he
was traveling.
After My Health Care Wishes ceased, VanderVeen
continued to encourage clients to keep copies of their
advance care directives on their phones. Mind Your
Loved Ones puts everything caregivers need to assist
aging relatives in one place, she says.
“A lot of times elderly people have four, five, six dier-
ent doctors they may be seeing, and any time there is a
hospital admission or a new doctor, they ask you all of
those questions about your medications and insurance,”
The ABA officially
launched the Mind
Your Loved Ones
app in May.
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