Advance care planning, with an expert beside you.
Patient Pathways healthcare navigators turn the hard conversations into documents your family can actually find.
Patient Pathways · Serving BC & Alberta since 2010 · Free first consultation
Almost everyone means to do this
Very few of us get to it. Not because the paperwork is complicated, but because of everything that sits in front of the paperwork.
The conversation keeps getting postponed
There is never an obvious week to raise it. So it waits, until a hospital hallway turns out to be where the family has it for the first time.
The forms are not the hard part
You can download an Advance Directive in a minute. Knowing which documents you actually need, and what to put in them, is where almost everyone stalls.
The details live in ten places
Diagnoses, medications, specialists, past decisions, the name of the surgeon from 2019. All of it spread across portals, paperwork, inboxes, and memory.
One person is carrying all of it
Usually an adult child, retelling the same story to every new provider and hoping their siblings would agree with the decisions being made.
How it works
Your navigator runs the process from end to end. Your part is the conversation, and the documents at the end of it.
Start with a conversation
You meet your Patient Pathways navigator over Zoom or in person. They begin with your values, beliefs, and what matters to you, not a form. Couples and adult children are welcome in the same sessions.
Your navigator gathers it in one place
Session notes, medications, contacts, documents you already have, and the questions still open all go into a single Care Colab workspace built around advance care planning. Where it helps, your navigator brings you and your family in to fill things in directly.
The documents get drafted
One step turns everything gathered into a clean, structured draft, following a template Patient Pathways designed for exactly this. Your navigator reviews it line by line with you.
You sign it and share it
You finish with documents you can sign, hand to the people who speak for you, and give to your care team, along with a summary your family can actually read.
Most people finish in three or four sessions. Couples and adult children are encouraged to join at no extra cost. The decisions land better when everyone hears them at the same time.
What you walk away with
Signed documents your care team will follow, and a family that already knows what is in them.
An Advance Directive
The treatments you consent to and the ones you refuse, written clearly enough that a care team can follow them when you cannot speak. Patient Pathways prepares these to line up with the Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment (MOST) your providers work from.
A Representation Agreement
The document naming who makes health care decisions for you if you lose capability. Worth putting in place even if that person is your spouse or your adult child. Your navigator will tell you what the equivalent is called where you live.
An In Case of Emergency (I.C.E.) summary
One page a paramedic or an ER nurse can read in thirty seconds: conditions, medications, allergies, who to call, and who speaks for you.
A family everyone can point to
The quiet outcome. Decisions were made once, together, with someone experienced in the room, so nobody is guessing at three in the morning.
Which documents apply to you depends on the province you live in. Your navigator will tell you which ones you need, and when a lawyer should be the one drafting them instead.
Two halves of one process
Neither of us could do this alone. Experience makes the decisions good; structure makes them stick.
Patient Pathways brings the experience
Established in 2010, Patient Pathways is among Canada's first independent patient advocacy and healthcare navigation providers. Their navigators are health care professionals who have sat in the rooms where these decisions get made: at bedsides, in family meetings, and in discharge planning.
- Navigators across BC and Alberta
- Advance care planning and document preparation
- Hospital stays, discharge, and complex diagnoses
- End-of-life preparation and support
Care Colab brings the workspace
Somewhere to put everything, in whatever state it arrives: notes, photos of paperwork, a file from a specialist, details you only half remember. Nothing has to be sorted first. Making sense of it is the work, and your navigator does that with you inside the workspace, so the right things go in and the right things come out.
- Add anything, in any state: notes, files, photos, loose ends
- The structuring happens for you, not by you
- Your navigator works in it beside you, not after you
- Documents drafted from a template Patient Pathways designed
What Patient Pathways clients say
Notes people have sent them after finishing their documents, about the navigators who did the work.
Thank you for your excellent leadership in assisting us with completing our Representation Agreements and Advance Care Directives. You were able to keep us on track so that documents were completed. We have enjoyed working with you and appreciate your guidance and patience.
Thank you for your help in preparing my Final Advance Directive, you made the whole process very easy and manageable. Your experience and knowledge has made all the difference in the comfort level I now feel.
Not sure what to ask for?
Pick whatever is on your mind. We will write the first message for you. You send it, and Patient Pathways takes it from there.
Nothing here is sent or saved on your behalf. Your enquiry goes to Patient Pathways when you choose to send it.
Where your information lives
This is the most private conversation most families ever have. The software behind it should behave accordingly.
Canadian servers
Everything gathered during your sessions is stored in a Canadian region, encrypted in transit, and backed up daily.
Private until someone shares it
Nothing is visible to anyone your navigator has not deliberately given access to. Sharing is granular, off by default, and revocable.
Never used to train AI
Drafting a document sends the relevant content to a paid AI service under an agreement that forbids training on it. Your information does not become someone's model.
Being straight about where we are: the product is in beta and run by a small team, which keeps the number of hands on your data very low. There is no third-party security audit or formal PIPEDA certification in place yet, and we would rather say so here than let you find out later. The full detail is in our privacy policy.
You help build it
The workspace is not only your navigator's. Where it suits your situation, they bring you and your family into it and you gather the information together.
You are invited in
Once you reach out, your navigator sets up a workspace for your situation and brings you into it, already laid out with the things they need to know.
Everyone can contribute
A sibling two time zones away, a spouse, the adult child doing the legwork. People add what they know when they have a moment, instead of relaying all of it through one person, and your navigator reviews what comes in and chases what is missing.
It ends up yours
When the documents are finished your navigator can hand the workspace itself over to you. The notes and files behind those documents stay with your family, and nothing has to be rebuilt or re-sent.
How much of this happens in the workspace is your navigator's call. Some families do all of it there, others talk it through over Zoom and leave the assembling to them.
Questions people ask first
Do I need to use Care Colab to work with Patient Pathways?
Do I need an account, or something to install?
Is any of this legal or medical advice?
What does it cost?
Where do I have to live?
What happens to my information afterwards?
What if we already started this on our own?
Something we did not cover? Ask us, or take it straight to Patient Pathways.
The best time to do this is while it is still hypothetical
Book a free consultation with a Patient Pathways navigator, or look around the workspace they use to put it all together.