I’m from Duxbury, MA. I remember the night of January 23, 2023. I was driving my son and several teammates home from winter lacrosse practice and couldn’t access the road leading to one of the boys’ homes due to a heavy police presence, helicopters and roadblocks. Details were sparse in that moment, but, like most major news events, they started to emerge quickly over the remainder of that evening and into the subsequent days and weeks.
The story of Lindsay Clancy really hit hard in our small community. And now, more than three years later, the trial has captivated the nation as a legal and personal tragedy. It’s heartbreaking on many levels; three young lives have been lost, and others have been torn apart by grief, regret, and second-guessing.
Her defense has centered on a claim of insanity, pointing to postpartum depression, alleged overmedication, and what her attorney has described as an episode of postpartum psychosis in the period surrounding the killings.
As someone who operates in the healthcare industry, working with companies trying to address myriad problems with new technologies and solutions that improve care and the patient experience, I find myself less drawn to courtroom drama and more to the uncomfortable systemic questions beneath it. Whatever the jury ultimately decides regarding criminal responsibility, this case shines a bright light on two failures our industry needs to own… and fix.
1. We still treat postpartum mental illness as a footnote, not a clinical priority
Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) affect a meaningful share of new mothers yet screening, follow-up, and crisis pathways remain inconsistent across health systems. Most obstetric practices ask a handful of screening questions at a six-week checkup — a single data point in a condition that can escalate rapidly in the weeks before that visit. Postpartum psychosis, though rarer than depression or anxiety, is a psychiatric emergency, and too few frontline providers, family members, or even patients themselves are trained to recognize its warning signs as urgent. Health systems that would never accept a single blood-pressure check as adequate management of a cardiac patient routinely accept exactly that for new mothers’ mental health. Building real awareness means investing in maternal mental health literacy for patients and partners, not just providers, and normalizing psychiatric follow-up as a standard part of postpartum care rather than an opt-in extra.
2. Our systems don’t always talk to each other, and patients pay for it
Reporting around the case has referenced concerns about medication management and coordination among multiple providers leading up to the tragedy. Whether or not that proves central to the legal outcome, it reflects something those across the industry already know privately: a patient can see an OB, a primary care physician, a psychiatrist, and a therapist in the same month, each documenting in a different EHR, each partially blind to what the others prescribed or observed. Care coordination software and interoperability standards have improved, but they remain unevenly adopted, and the burden of stitching together a full clinical picture still falls disproportionately on exhausted, possibly destabilized patient.
Fixing this isn’t just a technology problem — it’s a governance and incentive problem. Reimbursement models rarely pay for the care-coordination time required to connect a postpartum patient’s providers. Until health systems build reliable handoffs between obstetric, primary care, and behavioral health teams, and until postpartum mental health screening carries the same clinical weight as physical postpartum complications, we will keep asking the same question after the next tragedy: how did no one catch this in time? The honest answer is usually that someone did catch it (e.g. a provider flagged a concern or a partner noticed something off), but the system had no reliable path for that signal to travel before it was too late. Postpartum mental health may be where this gap has recently made headlines, but it’s a symptom of an infrastructure problem that touches nearly every condition our industry treats, not a flaw unique to maternal care. The same fragmentation shows up across nearly every major area of medicine including oncology, cardiology, neurology, chronic disease management, and behavioral health more broadly, wherever a patient’s care is split across multiple providers and systems don’t reliably talk to each other.
This incident and case are about one family. It’s also a mirror. Healthcare leaders and companies would do well to look into it and continue to innovate to address these two critical shortcomings.
Dan Martin is Executive Vice President, Healthcare Technology Practice Lead at V2 Communications, where he partners with healthcare innovators to build market awareness, establish credibility and accelerate business growth through strategic communications. With decades of experience advising digital health, health IT, diagnostics and care delivery companies, Dan specializes in translating complex healthcare innovations into compelling narratives that resonate with providers, payers, investors and the broader market.
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