Lindsay Clancy case shows the perils of health care silos

Tara covers the business of health care. Her stories focus on hospitals, doctors, and how their business practices affect patients — especially when private equity gets involved. She also writes about health insurance and ideas for improving our broken health system. You can reach Tara on Signal at tarabannow.70.

Thirteen medications across 30 different prescriptions. Five clinicians. Two hospitals. 

In the four months before killing her three children and attempting to kill herself, Lindsay Clancy desperately sought help for her deteriorating mental condition. But as her ongoing murder trial has made clear, the help she got was scattered across multiple providers who gave conflicting advice and, crucially, didn’t talk to one another.

For Americans with private insurance, Clancy included, this kind of fragmented care is the norm. Not only are providers siloed within their own employers with little incentive to communicate, there’s no universal electronic health records where they can see the totality of a patient’s care and medications. Experts following the Clancy case said if there had been someone in the driver’s seat responsible for overseeing all of her care, things may have turned out differently.