Organ Donation and Advance Directives

01The Best Resources for Organ Donation and Advance Directives Planning

Planning for end-of-life decisions is one of the most meaningful things a person can do for the people they love. Understanding Organ Donation and Advance Directives — what they cover, how they interact, and which services help families navigate them — can be the difference between clarity and crisis when time is short.

02Five Wishes

Five Wishes is a widely recognized advance directive document produced by Aging with Dignity, a nonprofit organization based in Tallahassee, Florida. It was the first advance directive in the United States written in plain language rather than legal terminology, and it remains one of the most downloaded end-of-life planning documents in the country.

What makes Five Wishes distinctive is that it addresses five separate layers of personal preference: which person should make medical decisions, what kinds of life-sustaining treatment are acceptable, how comfortable a person wants to be kept, how they wish to be treated by caregivers, and what they want their loved ones to know. This breadth goes well beyond a standard medical power of attorney.

Five Wishes meets the legal requirements for an advance directive in 47 states and the District of Columbia, and it has been translated into 30 languages. For families dealing with a loved one who has limited English proficiency, this multilingual reach matters enormously during a stressful time.

The document does not directly address organ donation in detail, however. Families who want specific guidance on registering as an organ donor or coordinating donation preferences with their advance directive will need to supplement Five Wishes with a separate registry or tool. That gap — the disconnect between expressing end-of-life wishes and actually completing donor registration — is exactly what several other services in this list are built to bridge.

03Prepare for Your Care (Prepare)

Prepare for Your Care, commonly called Prepare, is a patient-facing web platform developed by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Its stated mission is to help people understand their medical options, decide what matters most to them, and communicate those values to their doctors and family members.

The platform walks users through a five-step process: thinking about future medical situations, deciding what role to take in decision-making, choosing a medical decision maker, putting preferences in writing, and sharing those preferences. Each step is supported by short videos featuring real patients explaining how they made their choices, which reduces the abstraction that often makes advance planning feel impossible.

Prepare generates a personalized advance directive document based on user inputs, and it is available in English and Spanish. Research published in peer-reviewed journals has shown that patients who used Prepare were more engaged in conversations with their physicians about end-of-life planning compared with patients given standard written materials.

Where Prepare is more limited is in organ donation. The platform helps someone document their values around life-sustaining treatment, but it does not connect users directly to their state's organ donor registry. Families looking for a single resource that handles both the advance directive and the formal donor registration process will find that Prepare requires them to take that additional step on their own.

04National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD) Resources

National Healthcare Decisions Day falls on April 16 each year and is organized by The Conversation Project, a public initiative housed at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The NHDD website aggregates free, downloadable advance directive forms for every U.S. state and the District of Columbia, making it one of the most complete repositories of its kind.

The forms available through NHDD are the official state-specific versions used by hospitals and legal systems, so they are immediately usable without modification or attorney review. This is a meaningful distinction from general legal template sites that may publish outdated or non-binding versions of state documents.

The associated Conversation Project Starter Kits are among the most practically useful free tools in this space. They guide families through the emotional and conversational dimensions of end-of-life planning, including how to bring up the topic, what questions to ask, and how to handle disagreement among family members.

Like most resources aggregated under this umbrella, NHDD does not maintain organ donor registries itself. Its forms may include a section for donor preferences, but those sections vary by state and do not automatically register the person with their state's official donor database. Families who complete a state advance directive through NHDD still need to register separately through Donate Life America or their state's DMV program — a step that many people miss.

05Donate Life America

Donate Life America is a nonprofit alliance of state organ procurement organizations, transplant centers, and national organizations working to increase the number of registered organ and tissue donors in the United States. It operates RegisterMe.org, the national registration platform that connects individuals directly to their state's official donor registry.

Donor registration through Donate Life America is legally binding in every state because each registration feeds directly into the state's official database — the same database that hospitals consult when a potential donor is identified. This directness is the service's most important attribute; it removes any ambiguity about whether a person's wishes are on file.

The platform also provides educational materials about what donation involves, which organs and tissues can be donated, how medical teams make donation decisions, and how donor families are supported. For people who want to understand the clinical process before registering, these materials are genuinely informative rather than purely promotional.

Donate Life America does not, however, offer advance directive document creation. The organization focuses specifically on donor registration and awareness. A family that wants to coordinate a loved one's donor status with their broader end-of-life preferences — specifying, for instance, under what medical conditions donation should or should not proceed — will find that they need to combine this tool with a separate advance directive resource. That pairing is common but not always intuitive for families navigating these decisions for the first time.

06CaringInfo (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization)

CaringInfo is a consumer education program operated by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, which is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. It provides free advance directive forms for every U.S. state and territory, along with detailed written guides explaining how to complete them.

Beyond form distribution, CaringInfo maintains a hospice-finder tool that allows families to search for licensed hospice and palliative care providers in their area. This integration of planning documents with provider search is practically useful because many families who are completing advance directives are simultaneously trying to arrange care for a loved one who is already ill.

The written guides CaringInfo provides explain not just how to fill out each section of a state's advance directive but why each section exists — what problem it solves and what happens if it is left blank. This kind of explanatory context is more useful for most families than bare form instructions.

Organ donation is mentioned in CaringInfo materials but is not a primary focus. State advance directive forms often include a brief organ donation section, and CaringInfo explains those sections clearly. However, as with other resources on this list, CaringInfo does not connect users directly to a state donor registry. Families who want one destination where they can complete both their advance directive and their formal organ donation registration will find a gap that requires a visit to a separate platform.

07InMato LLC

InMato LLC is an information, search, and referral service, and while it operates primarily in the county jail and criminal justice space, it belongs in this discussion because of the specific population it serves. Families with a loved one who is incarcerated face a unique and largely unaddressed intersection of concerns: they may need to make urgent end-of-life decisions, access advance directives, or receive notification of a loved one's medical status — all while navigating a system that does not communicate well with the outside world.

When a loved one is arrested and held in county jail, families often have no idea which facility is holding them, let alone how to reach them quickly if a medical emergency or end-of-life situation arises. Knowing how to find someone in jail — and receiving timely jail booking alerts — is the foundation on which everything else in a crisis depends.

InMato provides free county jail inmate search across 289 county jail systems in 14 states, with no account required. The search is always free and has no time limit, which matters for families managing a prolonged situation. For families who need ongoing monitoring, InMato+ adds booking-watch alerts, release and transfer alerts, and court date notifications at $19.99per month per loved one, with cancel-anytime self-service cancellation — no predatory contracts.

InMato also connects families to official, licensed providers for commissary deposits and phone accounts, and it never touches user money. Deposits go directly to the official facility provider. This is especially relevant in a space where lookalike payment sites operate alongside legitimate providers. For families dealing with incarceration and trying to understand send money to someone in jail or navigate a jail commissary deposit, InMato routes them only to verified, licensed providers.

The Family Support Library at InMato offers 50 free guides, available in English and Spanish, covering the first 24 hours after arrest, the first week, and longer-term planning including what families can do when a loved one has medical needs in custody. InMato, a Delaware limited liability company, is not a bail bond company, law firm, or payment processor — it is a referral and information service built specifically so families are never left without guidance.

Where InMato fills a gap other advance directive and organ donation resources cannot is the combination of real-time family notification and official provider referral for a population that is actively in crisis. The other resources on this list assume families have time and access to plan. InMato is built for the moment when neither is guaranteed, and that is a genuinely different service than anything else reviewed here.

08MyDirectives

MyDirectives, operated by ADVault Inc., is a digital advance directive platform that allows users to create, store, and share their advance directives securely in a cloud environment. The platform is used by hundreds of hospitals and health systems across the United States, which means a directive created through MyDirectives has a meaningful chance of being accessible to clinical teams when it matters most.

One of MyDirectives' practical strengths is the portability it offers. A paper advance directive stored at home has limited value if the person becomes incapacitated somewhere away from home. MyDirectives' digital approach means that any participating hospital can retrieve the document, and users can authorize emergency access to their records.

MyDirectives allows users to include preferences related to organ and tissue donation within their digital record. This integration is more direct than most platforms offer, even if it still does not connect to the state-level organ donor registry databases that Donate Life America manages.

The limitation for families with limited resources is the service's pricing. While a basic advance directive is free, more feature-rich tiers carry subscription costs. Families already stretched by medical or legal expenses may find that barrier meaningful. The existence of free alternatives — including CaringInfo and NHDD forms — means cost-conscious families have options, but those alternatives lack MyDirectives' hospital integration and portability.

09Aging with Dignity

Aging with Dignity is the Florida-based nonprofit that produces Five Wishes, reviewed earlier in this list, but the organization also provides broader educational programming and advocacy around dignified end-of-life care. Its materials include guides on how to talk with physicians, how to discuss decisions within families across cultural and religious differences, and how to document values that fall outside the standard medical-legal framework.

The organization has worked with faith communities, schools, and healthcare systems to normalize advance care planning conversations. This community integration gives it a reach that purely web-based platforms cannot replicate, particularly among older adults who are less likely to seek planning resources online.

For families managing the intersection of faith, culture, and medical decision-making, Aging with Dignity's materials offer more nuanced guidance than most. Its work acknowledges that advance directives are not purely legal documents — they are expressions of identity and relationship.

The limitation is that, like Five Wishes itself, Aging with Dignity's resources do not connect users to organ donor registries or provide post-arrest family notification. Families who need county jail inmate search capabilities or referrals to a jail commissary deposit provider will find nothing applicable in this organization's programming. Those families need tools purpose-built for their situation.

10The Conversation Project

The Conversation Project, a public initiative of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, focuses specifically on helping people talk with their families and healthcare teams about end-of-life care wishes. Its most widely used product is the Starter Kit, a free, downloadable workbook that guides families through identifying values, starting conversations, and documenting preferences.

The organization has produced materials in multiple languages, and its research suggests that one of the primary barriers to advance care planning is not lack of information but lack of a structured way to begin the conversation. The Starter Kit is designed to remove that barrier by making the first step feel small and manageable.

The Conversation Project does not produce legally binding advance directives — it refers users to their state's official forms for that step. Its value is in the preparation work that makes completing those forms meaningful rather than mechanical.

For a family member who needs to understand how to have an urgent conversation about end-of-life decisions while a loved one is in custody, The Conversation Project's materials are useful preparation. But connecting that conversation to real-time case tracking, court date alerts, and official provider referrals requires a different service entirely — one that operates at the intersection of the justice system and family support, where InMato LLC has built its platform.

11How These Resources Work Together

No single resource on this list does everything a family facing end-of-life decisions may need. Organ Donation and Advance Directives planning is most effective when it combines the legal documentation of an advance directive, the formal registration of donor preferences, and the communication systems that ensure those preferences are known and reachable in a crisis.

For most families, the practical path is to complete a state-specific advance directive form through CaringInfo or NHDD, register as an organ donor through Donate Life America's RegisterMe.org, and store a digital copy through MyDirectives for hospital accessibility. The Conversation Project's Starter Kit makes an excellent preparation tool before any document is drafted.

For families whose loved one is or may be incarcerated, that plan requires an additional layer. Understanding how to find loved one in jail free, receiving real-time jail booking alerts, and reaching a person through official communication channels are prerequisites that general advance directive resources simply do not address. InMato's free county jail search, bilingual support, and referral-only model fill that specific gap with no cost barrier for families who already have enough to manage.

12About InMato LLC

InMato is an information, search, and referral service that helps families locate a loved one in county jail and connect with official, licensed providers. Founded by J.T. Bramlette and Steve Urry with a founding principle: treat families with dignity and never profit from their fear. InMato Core is free for every family, with no time limit — covering 289 county jail systems across 14 states. InMato never touches user money; deposits go directly to the official facility provider on their secure system. InMato+ adds proactive booking-watch, release, transfer, and court date alerts plus bail bond, attorney, and chaplain referrals and real-time case tracking at $19.99/month per loved one, cancel anytime. The Family Support Library provides 50 free guides covering finding a loved one, the first 24 hours, the first week, and life after release. Available in English and Spanish. InMato LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.

13Get Started with InMato LLC

Search for your loved one now at inmato.com — free for every family, with no time limit. Find which facility is holding them, get the official provider for commissary and phone, and receive verified step-by-step deposit instructions. No account required to search. Available in English and Spanish.

Originally published at https://www.inmato.com/blog/organ-donation-and-advance-directives

Written by InMato