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The fourth newly recommended national priority is to ensure that patients receive well-coordinated care within and across all health care organizations, settings, and levels of care. The new age of medical specialization has made it particularly hazardous to patients because different specialists are prescribing medications often not knowing what other doctors will prescribe. There is most often no communication between different specialists because the primary care physician (PCP) refers the patient and does the communicating. Thus, the heart specialist and the foot doctor will most probably never speak to each other because they will not see any reason for a provider team conference. However, each one has the authority to prescribe medications without knowing what the other doctors intend to prescribe. Consequently, there are untold thousands of people each year who suffer death or debilitating injury from drug interactions or debilitating central nervous system depression from multiple drugs called “polypharmacy.”
