Atul Gawande talks about this a lot in "Complications" [1]. A great book about medical procedure, and specifically about the process of learning, trial and error and the whole feedback loop of working with disease.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Complications-Surgeons-Notes-Imperfec...

When my grandfather died with cancer and fibrosis, one of the main complications involved in getting compensation from EEOICPA was the fact that his county doesn't have a coroner. They have a "medical examiner" who is based 70 miles away and never visits, plus some nurses he employs. As a result, death certificates in that county are only signed in extraordinary circumstances. The federal bureaucracy doesn't accept unsigned certificates for the purpose of establishing a cause of death. The county medical examiner is paid a flat yearly fee, so guess how many autopsies he performs?

We shelled out for a private company for an autopsy, but post-mortem, lots of things happen to the body that make identifying a source of an infection really hard – basically, it didn't tell us anything new :(

I'm so sorry for your loss, esp. in those uncertain circumstances.

Thanks