What to Do When a Family Member Is Hospitalised: A Financial Checklist

When someone you love is suddenly hospitalised, the financial and administrative side of it is the last thing anyone wants to think about — and exactly the thing that can’t wait. A calm, prepared family handles this in minutes. An unprepared one spends the first anxious hours hunting for a policy number. Here’s what actually matters, and what to have ready before you’re ever in this situation.

The first hour: getting cashless treatment approved

If the hospital is in your insurer’s network, ask for cashless treatment immediately at admission. Under IRDAI’s 2024 Master Circular on Health Insurance Business, insurers must respond to a cashless pre-authorisation request within one hour, and give the final go-ahead for discharge within three hours of the hospital requesting it. If the insurer misses that discharge window, any additional charges the delay causes must be covered by the insurer, not you.

To make this happen quickly, the hospital’s insurance desk will need:

• Your health insurance policy number and the insurer’s name
• The policyholder’s ID proof (Aadhaar, PAN, or similar)
• The e-card or policy document, if available

Keep a photo of your policy card and ID on your phone, not just the physical card in a drawer at home — in an emergency, whoever gets to the hospital first should be able to act, not wait for someone to go home and find the folder.

If cashless isn’t possible: filing for reimbursement

If the hospital isn’t in-network, or cashless authorisation is denied for some reason, you pay upfront and claim reimbursement afterward. Keep every original bill, discharge summary, prescription, and diagnostic report — insurers typically require these within 15 to 90 days of discharge depending on your specific policy, so check your policy document for the exact window rather than assuming. Insurers are generally expected to settle a claim within 30 days of receiving all required documents.

Getting access to money quickly

If the hospitalised person is a joint holder on a bank account, the other joint holder can typically continue operating it normally — this is one of the few practical reasons a joint account is genuinely useful in an emergency, beyond convenience.

If they’re the sole holder and unable to communicate, this is genuinely difficult in India. There’s no automatic legal mechanism that lets a family member step in and operate someone else’s account just because they’re incapacitated — a Power of Attorney only works if it was signed while the person had full mental capacity, before the emergency, specifically naming someone to act on their behalf. It cannot be created in the moment you need it.

This is worth a genuinely unglamorous but important family conversation: whether a spouse or adult child should hold a limited Power of Attorney for exactly this kind of situation, set up well in advance and hopefully never used.

Medical decisions, if the person can’t communicate

Separately from money, there’s the question of medical treatment decisions. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Common Cause v. Union of India (2018), Indian law recognises a person’s right to record an Advance Medical Directive (a “living will”) specifying what treatment they do or don’t want if they become unable to communicate, and naming someone authorised to make those calls. The Court simplified the attestation process in 2023, removing the need for a magistrate’s countersignature — a notary or gazetted officer, with two witnesses, is now sufficient.

Like a Power of Attorney, this only helps if it exists before the emergency. It’s not a pleasant document to prepare, but it spares your family an agonising decision made with no guidance, at the worst possible time.

What to actually keep ready

A simple folder — physical or digital — that any family member could grab or access, containing:

• ID proofs for every family member
• Health insurance policy documents or e-cards, and the insurer’s helpline number
• A list of current medications and known allergies or conditions
• Emergency contacts, including your family doctor if you have one
• Blood group information

Check your employer’s cover too

If the hospitalised person is salaried, many employers provide group health insurance or a personal accident policy that can supplement, or sometimes fully cover, the cost — but only if someone remembers to inform HR promptly. It’s easy to forget this option exists in the moment.

Where eKosha fits

This entire article describes things that are easy in theory and hard in the moment — which is exactly why they need to be prepared in advance, not figured out during a crisis. eKosha is where you record your insurance policies, their details, and your nominees ahead of time, so that when a family member needs to act quickly, the information is already organised and shareable — not something they’re searching for while standing in a hospital corridor.