Lindsay Clancy: 30 prescriptions, zero care coordination — SkimNews

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- Lindsay Clancy received 13 medications across 30 different prescriptions from 5 clinicians at 2 hospitals in the four months before she killed her three children and attempted suicide.
- Clancy's case illustrates that fragmented care is the norm for Americans with private insurance, with providers siloed within their own employers and little incentive to communicate with one another.
- Experts following Clancy's ongoing murder trial said if one person had been in the driver's seat responsible for overseeing all of her care, things may have turned out differently.
- The U.S. healthcare system has no universal electronic health records where providers can see the totality of a patient's care and medications.
- Clancy's multiple providers gave conflicting advice — a breakdown her murder trial has made public — without any mechanism to reconcile the differing recommendations.
Why it matters: The Clancy case shows the U.S. has no structural mechanism — not unified records, not a mandated care coordinator — to prevent 5 clinicians from writing 30 prescriptions for one deteriorating patient without talking, and every privately insured American faces that same fragmented architecture by default.
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