Two health technology companies announced a partnership this week that aims to solve a quiet paperwork problem: advance care planning documents often live in a file cabinet, on a bookshelf, or in a safe deposit box, separate from everything else in a person's health record. b.well Connected Health and MyDirectives said on October 21, 2026 that they will connect b.well's data network to the MyDirectives national registry, so people can view their advance directives and portable medical order forms inside the digital health experiences they already use, according to the companies' announcement.
These documents record a person's wishes for care and make treatment preferences clear to care teams when the person cannot communicate for themselves. That is exactly when a document locked in a drawer is hardest to find. The partnership is an early step in extending patient access to advance care planning information, and b.well is the first consumer-facing organization to integrate with MyDirectives' nationwide registry for a patient access use case, per the announcement.
For readers building their own health routines, this is one more piece of the wellbeing picture that rarely gets attention until it matters: knowing your own records are where you can reach them, and that the people you trust can reach them too. For related coverage, see Wellbeing at Work: Small Habits That Actually Stick.
What the partnership actually changes
Advance care planning documents would become a new type of information available to consumers in their b.well-powered health summary, and will be available through b.well's CMS Aligned Network, according to the announcement. In plain terms: instead of a separate document you have to hunt for, your recorded care preferences would sit alongside the rest of your health information in one place.
Most existing MyDirectives integrations, the companies note, support a different use case. They give advance care planning facilitators access to the MyDirectives for Clinicians solution, or let clinicians and emergency first responders retrieve documents for treatment. Putting the documents in front of the patient, in a consumer app, is the newer piece.
How big is the registry behind this?
MyDirectives describes itself as maintaining the largest nationwide registry of advance care planning documents, including advance directives and portable medical order forms such as POLST and MOLST. Those forms, common in clinical settings, carry a patient's goals of care into treatment decisions.
The company reports several scale figures worth noting, all self-reported in the announcement: it processes more than 5 million secure ACP document queries each week, reaches more than 90% of the U.S. healthcare ecosystem, and holds HITRUST R2 and SOC 2 Type II certifications. Those are the issuer's own numbers, not independent measurements, but they give a sense of the infrastructure this partnership plugs into.
What the companies say, in their own words
"Advance care planning documents reflect a person's own choices about the care they want, and those choices should be easy to find when they matter most," said Kristen Valdes, CEO and founder of b.well Connected Health, in the announcement. "People should be able to access their health information, decide who can see it, and trust that their wishes will be respected."
Scott Brown, CEO of MyDirectives, framed the partnership as giving b.well's users "another means of taking an active role in their healthcare." He pointed to MyDirectives.care, the company's free consumer platform, where individuals can create and update an advance directive, upload existing documents including POLST forms and mental health advance directives, and share them with family members and care teams.
Why this matters for everyday health planning
Advance care planning is one of those tasks that is easy to postpone. The announcement's own framing makes the case for not waiting: the goal, per MyDirectives, is for everyone to "document, manage, and share their goals of care and treatment preferences before a crisis." A document that exists but cannot be found does less work than one that can.
If you have been putting off this kind of planning, the free platform at MyDirectives.care is one place to start, and the partnership suggests such documents will increasingly appear in the same apps people use for the rest of their health information. A small step this week: check whether you know where your own documents, or your family's, are kept. That is the whole habit. It takes ten minutes and it is the part of looking after your prevention plan that no one sees.
The companies share a stated goal of making advance care planning information easier to find through digital tools consumers use every day. Whether that access translates into documents actually reaching care teams at the right moment is the thing to watch as the integration rolls out. We covered a connected angle in What does wellbeing actually mean? A definition guide.
