How to Fill Out the Colorado Medical Durable Power of Attorney (MDPOA)

To fill out the Colorado Medical Durable Power of Attorney, download a free MDPOA form, enter your information and your agent’s information, choose when your agent’s authority begins, write any specific treatment instructions you want followed, and sign and date the form. Colorado law requires only your signature for the document to be legally valid, though witnesses and a notary are worth adding if the form might ever be used outside the state.

Before You Fill Anything In

Two decisions belong up front, before you touch the form: who your agent will be, and where you’re getting the form itself.

Your agent is the person who will make medical decisions for you when you can’t. Pick someone who knows your values, can handle high-pressure conversations with doctors, and will follow your wishes even if they personally disagree. Spouses, adult children, siblings, and close friends are all common choices. Name at least one successor agent as well, so there’s a backup if your primary agent is unavailable, unwilling, or unable to serve.

Watch for conflicts. If you live in a residential care facility, think carefully before naming a staff member or the facility’s owner as your agent. And know that if you name your spouse and later divorce, legally separate, or annul the marriage, that appointment is automatically revoked under Colorado law; the rest of the MDPOA stays intact.¹

You don’t need to buy anything or hire an attorney. Free MDPOA forms are available from several sources:

UCHealth, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, and Boulder Community Health each publish downloadable forms. The UCHealth version is available in multiple languages.²
The Colorado Bar Association offers advance directive forms and guidance.³
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment links to MDPOA forms and related resources on its advance care planning page.⁴

Any Colorado adult 18 or older can create an MDPOA, as long as you have decisional capacity when you sign: you understand what the form does, who you’re appointing, and the kinds of decisions your agent could make. Capacity is presumed unless a court or physician has formally determined otherwise. If you’re lucid now but worried about a future diagnosis, sign the form while you still clearly have capacity.

Filling In the Principal and Agent Information

The top of the form identifies you (the “principal”) and the people you’re appointing.

Enter your full legal name, address, and date of birth. Then enter your primary agent’s full legal name, home address, and phone number. Some forms mark the address and phone number as optional, but fill them in anyway. If a hospital needs to reach your agent at 2 a.m., the phone number is the difference between a quick call and a frantic search.² Repeat the process for each successor agent.

Choosing When Your Agent’s Authority Begins

Most Colorado MDPOA forms give you two options, and you initial the one you want.

The first option, and the one most people choose, is that your agent gains authority only after a physician or qualified medical professional determines you lack decisional capacity. You stay in charge of your own care for as long as you can communicate your decisions.⁵

The second option activates your agent’s authority immediately upon signing. That’s useful in a narrow set of situations, but for most people the first option is the right one.

Writing Instructions About Your Care

Under C.R.S. § 15-14-506, your agent has the same power to make medical treatment decisions that you would have yourself, including the right to consent to or refuse treatment, artificial nutrition, and hydration.¹ That’s a broad default. The form includes an optional section where you can narrow or direct it.

Topics people commonly address in that section:

Life-sustaining treatment: whether you want CPR, mechanical ventilation, or dialysis under various circumstances.
Artificial nutrition and hydration: whether you want tube feeding or IV fluids if you can’t eat or drink on your own.
Pain management: your preferences for comfort care, including whether you accept medication that might hasten death.
Religious or spiritual care: rites, prayers, or restrictions on treatment based on your faith.

If you leave the section blank, your agent makes decisions based on your known wishes or, if those aren’t known, your best interests.¹ Writing even a few sentences about your general values gives your agent a stronger foundation for hard calls.

Organ and Tissue Donation

Colorado law allows you to include a written statement about organ and tissue donation in your MDPOA. If you want to donate, the statement must be executed in accordance with Colorado’s Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (C.R.S. Article 19, Part 2).¹ Some MDPOA forms include a checkbox or a dedicated space; if yours doesn’t, attach a separate document. Tell your agent what you want to donate, whether that’s organs, tissues, or your full body for research.

HIPAA and Medical Record Access

Under § 15-14-506(3), your agent is automatically your “designated representative” with the same rights to access your medical records that you have.¹ That statutory language effectively satisfies HIPAA’s requirement for authorized access, so a separate HIPAA release isn’t strictly necessary. If your form includes one anyway, sign it. The extra documentation helps if your agent ever needs records from an out-of-state facility or a provider unfamiliar with Colorado law.

Signing the Form

Colorado keeps this simple. You sign the form and date it. That’s all the law requires. No witnesses. No notary. No attorney.⁶

Most hospital-published forms still include spaces for two witnesses and a notary acknowledgment, and using them is smart. Witnesses and notarization aren’t required in Colorado, but they make the document more likely to be accepted without argument in other states. If you travel, split time between states, or might receive care near a state border, the extra step is cheap insurance. Witnesses on most Colorado MDPOA forms need to be at least 18 years old.² A notary acknowledgment typically costs about $15 to $20 at a bank, UPS Store, or hospital that has a notary on staff.

Getting Copies to the Right People

A signed MDPOA that nobody can find is the same as no MDPOA at all. Once the form is executed:

Give a signed copy to your primary agent and to each successor agent, and make sure they know they’ve been appointed.
Give a copy to your primary care physician and ask the office to scan it into your medical record. Once it’s in an electronic system, other facilities in that network can pull it up.
Give copies to any hospital or specialist you see regularly, especially if you receive care across networks.

Keep the original in a secure but accessible place at home. A designated medical file, a desk drawer, or a fireproof box that someone other than you can reach all work. Avoid locking the original in a bank safe deposit box; those are often inaccessible on nights, weekends, and holidays, which is when emergencies happen. Tell your agent and one other trusted person where the original lives.

Changing or Revoking the MDPOA Later

You can revoke your MDPOA at any time as long as you have decisional capacity. Colorado law explicitly preserves your right to revoke an agent’s authority or override any decision your agent makes; no agent can consent to or refuse treatment over your objection.¹

The safest way to revoke is in writing. Draft a short statement identifying the original MDPOA by date and by the agent’s name, state that you revoke it, and sign and date the revocation. Notify your former agent, your doctors, and any facility with a copy on file. Retrieve or destroy the old copies where you can. If you’re replacing the document with a new one, include a sentence in the new MDPOA stating that it revokes all prior medical durable powers of attorney.

Two revocations happen automatically. Divorce, legal separation, or annulment revokes a spouse’s appointment while leaving the rest of the document in effect. And if your agent can’t or won’t serve when needed, that appointment is revoked by operation of law and authority passes to your successor agent.¹

What an MDPOA Doesn’t Cover

The MDPOA appoints a person to make decisions for you. It doesn’t lay out your treatment preferences the way a living will does, and it isn’t a medical order that emergency responders can act on in the field.

A living will (formally a Declaration as to Medical Treatment) is a written statement of your own treatment preferences. It speaks for itself. Most estate planners recommend having both documents, because a living will can’t anticipate every scenario your agent might face, and an agent without a living will has less written guidance about what you’d want.

Colorado’s Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment (MOST) form is different again. It’s a set of medical orders signed by a physician, advanced practice nurse, or physician assistant in consultation with you.⁷ Emergency medical technicians must follow a MOST form but cannot honor an MDPOA or living will.⁸ MOST forms are for people who are seriously ill or frail, and they travel across care settings. If you have a serious or progressive illness, ask your doctor whether a MOST form should accompany your MDPOA.

1
Justia Law. Colorado Revised Statutes Section 15-14-506 – Medical Durable Power of Attorney
2
UCHealth. Colorado Medical Durable Power of Attorney Form
3
The Colorado Bar. Advance Medical Directives
4
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Advance Care Planning for Patients and Families
5
Kaiser Permanente. Colorado Medical Durable Power of Attorney Form
6
CU Anschutz School of Medicine. Choose A Decision Maker
7
CIVHC. Colorado Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment (MOST)
8
CaringInfo. Portable Medical Orders (POLSTs) vs Advance Directives