A Small Emergency-Care Tool Splits Off from Family Support

Family life and institutional rules have diverged

In 2024, 13,800 children were born to parents who had not registered their marriage, accounting for 5.8% of all births. That is roughly one in every 17 children, and a substantial increase from 1.2% in 1995.

In the Social Survey that year, 67.4% of people aged 13 and older said people can live together without getting married. That is roughly two in three people. But living together alone does not give a cohabiting partner the right to consent to medical treatment or become a legal representative.

The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (한국보건사회연구원) examined 336 people with experience of unmarried cohabitation. Of them, 12.5% said they had faced limits in acting as a guardian at a hospital or in an emergency. The figure was 25.4% among people who had cohabited for five years or longer. This was a small, self-reported sample, however, so it cannot be treated as the rate for all cohabiting households.

Under Korea’s Medical Service Act (의료법), the person who must receive an explanation and give consent for major surgery, blood transfusions, or general anesthesia is the patient. If the patient cannot decide, it is their legal representative. A legal representative is someone legally authorized to act for the patient, so listing a cohabiting partner as an emergency contact does not create that authority. Emergency treatment may proceed as an exception when waiting for consent could seriously endanger a person’s life or body.

Family Centers (가족센터) provide counselling, education, and cultural programmes regardless of family type, and there were 244 nationwide as of May 2024. But some schemes, such as cash support for single-parent families, assess income and family status. Parents living together in a de facto marriage may be excluded from single-parent support, so eligibility rules can differ between services even within the same household.

One piece to separate from family services

Consider a 39-year-old office worker in Seoul who has lived with a partner for seven years and jointly cares for a dog. Their parents live in another region. Their cohabiting partner would be the first person to arrive at the hospital if they became ill, but the company and hospital still have the parents’ phone numbers on file.

To change an emergency contact, this person has to separately find the company HR screen, the hospital registration desk, and the emergency information settings on their phone. They send their medication list and the location of insurance documents to their partner in separate messages, then ask each hospital again which documents are needed for someone else to collect medical records. Even after organizing everything once, they have to re-enter the same information after moving or changing hospitals.

These tasks have been split among family counselling, welfare guidance, and hospital administration because labels such as spouse, parent, and child generally explained both the contact person and the person responsible for care. Family Centers had to counsel people on several problems at once, while hospitals were safer using prescribed documents to verify patients and representatives.

But as more households cannot be understood through the family label alone, the reason for keeping this bundle together weakens. What is needed is not a massive service that grants a new family status. It is a small tool that records what a trusted person should do in which situation, and connects that record to the necessary paperwork.

The separable component is an “emergency care relationship card.” A user records the contact order, tasks another person can perform, medications, pet handover arrangements, and the location of key documents. For items that need hospital-specific authorization documents, the card adds instructions for completion and a renewal date. The other person reviews the role and accepts or declines it.

After entering this information once, the 39-year-old worker above could use a contact-change notice for their employer and a checklist of what is needed to apply to receive medical records on someone else’s behalf at a hospital. In an emergency, the cohabiting partner could quickly find medication information and the parents’ contact details, without mistakenly assuming they are responsible for medical decisions they cannot make.

What does not change is equally clear. This card cannot make a cohabiting partner a legal representative or eliminate a hospital’s verification process. Medical judgment and relationship disputes still require people. The first product should therefore not promise to guarantee every authority. It should begin with the narrow scope of contact details, information, and document preparation.

Overseas, role-specific services came first

Singapore’s Ministry of Health offers myACP, a free online service through which people aged 21 and older who do not have a serious illness can record the medical care and support they would want in the future. Users can designate up to two people, including non-relatives, to communicate their wishes to clinicians if they cannot speak for themselves.

As of September 2025, Singapore had accumulated more than 87,000 advance care plans. Since myACP launched in June that year, 4,350 plans had been completed online. This designation does not automatically grant legal representative authority; it clarifies the person’s role in communicating the patient’s wishes.

In the United States, OurFamilyWizard separately sells a service that bundles only the messages, schedules, expense records, and files needed for co-parenting after separation or divorce. Each parent uses their own account and pays roughly KRW 150,000 to KRW 400,000 per year.

Researchers affiliated with the Australian National University found that the service is strong at recording when messages were sent and read, logging expenses, and producing documents. But they said there is still insufficient evidence that it improves parental conflict or children’s circumstances in practice.

Japan’s Ohitorisama Trust Association provides hospital paperwork support, emergency contact arrangements, and accompaniment to doctor consultations for people who find it difficult to ask family members for hospitalization guarantees or emergency contact help. Support for stays ranging from same-day surgery to eight nights costs JPY 33,000, or about KRW 280,000 at the reference-date exchange rate, plus travel expenses.

This case shows that recording relationships in an app and sending a person to a hospital can be sold as separate services. But user numbers and emergency-response outcomes would be needed to assess its scale and results.

What could come from this

1. Emergency care relationship card

• What it does: Records contact order, medications, document locations, and tasks to delegate in one place, then connects users to the preparation needed for hospital documents.
• Who uses it: Office workers in their 30s and 40s who live far from their parents and want a cohabiting partner or friend to be the first contact.
• Why now: More people live together, but they must personally distinguish between being an emergency contact and having legal authority.
• First screen: A question: “If I cannot be contacted right now, who should be contacted, and in what order?” alongside a button to add contacts.

2. Child handover record

• What it does: Lets two caregivers exchange a child’s schedule, medication, supplies, expenses, and handover details in a set format.
• Who uses it: Parents who live separately and take turns caring for an elementary-school child, whether they were married or not.
• Why now: Rather than treating every co-parenting conversation as counselling, separating out schedule and expense records may leave room to reduce repeated conflict.
• First screen: Three sections for this week’s handover time, the child’s supplies, and expenses that have not yet been confirmed.

3. Local support finder that does not ask about relationship labels

• What it does: Instead of asking for a family label, it uses a user’s area, household members, child’s age, and needed help to show available Family Center programmes.
• Who uses it: Parents raising a child together without registering their marriage who do not know whether they can use a Family Center.
• Why now: Family Centers are open to all families, but individual programmes each have their own location, age, and household requirements.
• First screen: Fields for address and child’s age, plus choices for “counselling,” “care,” “education,” or “groups.”

4. Shared household shift board

• What it does: Divides money and tasks in shared living—such as living costs, grocery shopping, hospital accompaniment, and pet care—on one screen.
• Who uses it: Three people in their 30s who live with two friends and take turns helping one person recover after surgery.
• Why now: Who actually pays money and spends time matters more to maintaining a household than the label of a family relationship.
• First screen: Shows tasks without an assigned person this week and amounts that have not yet been settled.

What to check today

Call the medical-records desk at three nearby hospitals and ask: “When a patient is conscious, what documents are required to designate a cohabiting partner who is not a relative to apply for the patient’s medical records on their behalf?” If two or more hospitals require different documents or explanations, or staff cannot answer immediately, there is a starting point for a document-guidance service. If all three make the same form easy to download, guidance alone is weaker, so the product should also bundle contact and role management.

Why this matters where you are

Korea’s conditions matter here: hospital procedures, legal representative authority, family-support eligibility, and the Family Center network are all Korean institutions. In your own market, check whether a non-relative can be named for medical-record requests, whether care preferences can be recorded separately from legal authority, and whether local support services use household labels as eligibility criteria. The transferable opportunity is a narrow tool for contacts, roles, information, and document preparation—not a promise to create legal rights.