Who’s in Charge of a Parent’s Care? Getting the Doctors to Talk
Published · By Adam Williams and Andy Gillis — family caregivers, CareCoordinate founders
A parent with heart failure, diabetes and arthritis can easily have a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, a rheumatologist, a primary care doctor and a pharmacist, each prescribing, none of them reading the others' notes. The daughter sitting in the fifth waiting room of the month is the only person who has been in all five rooms.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines care coordination as deliberately organizing a patient's care and sharing information among everyone involved so that the patient's needs and preferences are known ahead of time and communicated at the right time to the right people.1 When no one in the system is doing that, the family does. This guide is how.
Name the coordinator, even if it is you
The first move is to stop waiting for the system to coordinate itself. Tell your parent, and then tell each office, that the family is coordinating care and that one person is the contact for all of them. Write that person's name and number on the medication list. Medicare's own guidance for patients and families is that they can help coordinate their care by keeping their providers informed and bringing the full list of medicines and doctors to each visit; nobody is going to be surprised that you are doing it.2
The one list every doctor gets
A single page does most of the work: every medication with its dose and prescriber, every diagnosis, every doctor with their phone number, the pharmacy, and the allergies. Bring a current copy to every appointment and hand it over before the doctor speaks. A specialist who can see what the other four prescribed prescribes differently, and the duplications and interactions families fear are caught by the person reading the whole list. In CareCoordinate that page is the circle's medication list and provider directory printed as one sheet; with any tool, the discipline is that the same current list reaches every prescriber, every time.
Make the visit summaries travel
Each visit produces a summary, usually in the office's patient portal. The coordinator's job is to move it: into the family's shared record, to the primary care doctor's office, and to the next specialist before their appointment, with a one-line note of what changed. Ask each office how they prefer to receive it; many accept a portal message or a fax from the family. The National Institute on Aging's guidance on preparing for appointments includes bringing the results and notes from other doctors, and that is the same motion seen from the receiving end.4
Ask the primary care doctor to hold the thread
Someone with a medical degree should be reading everything, and the primary care doctor is the natural candidate. Ask directly: will you be the doctor who reviews what the specialists do and tells us when something conflicts? Ask, too, whether the practice offers a chronic care management program, which Medicare pays for in patients with two or more chronic conditions and which often comes with a nurse or care manager whose job is this coordination.2 If the practice says no to both, that is useful information about whether it is the right practice.
Carry the questions in and the changes out
Before each appointment, write the questions the other doctors' visits raised: the cardiologist changed this, does it affect what you prescribed? The questions-are-the-answer approach from AHRQ is to prepare a short list and ask them in order, because the most important question is the one that does not get asked when time runs out.3 After the appointment, before leaving the parking lot, record what changed in the shared record with the doctor's name, so the siblings who were not in the room and the next specialist all read the same thing.
Until a doctor agrees to coordinate, the family does: one person named as the contact, one current list of medications, diagnoses and doctors handed to every prescriber, every visit summary moved to the record and to the next doctor, a direct request to the primary care doctor to hold the thread, and the questions carried in and the changes carried out of every appointment.
Questions families ask
What do I do when my parent's doctors don't communicate with each other?
- Become the coordinator: bring one current list of medications, diagnoses and doctors to every appointment, move each visit summary to the other doctors and to a shared family record, and ask the primary care doctor to review what the specialists do and flag conflicts.
Who is supposed to coordinate an elderly parent's medical care?
- Often no one is, unless the primary care practice offers a chronic care management program or the family asks the primary care doctor to take the role. Until then the family coordinates, and saying so at each visit makes the offices treat you as the contact.
What is chronic care management?
- A Medicare-covered service for people with two or more chronic conditions in which a practice, often through a nurse or care manager, coordinates care between visits. Ask the primary care practice whether it offers the program.
How do I share one doctor's notes with another?
- Download the visit summary from the office's patient portal and send it to the other doctor's office the way they prefer, usually a portal message or a fax, with a one-line note of what changed. Keep a copy in the family's shared record.
Sources
- Care Coordination — Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Accessed October 3, 2026
- Coordinating Your Care — Medicare.gov. Accessed September 18, 2026
- Questions Are the Answer — Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Accessed September 18, 2026
- How To Prepare for a Doctor's Appointment — National Institute on Aging. Accessed September 18, 2026