Ortiz said that the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office was taking over the investigation because criminal activity had been ruled out, and would provide more details later on the death and circumstances surrounding it.

Firefighters rushed to the home after receiving a call from a female occupant at 9:40 p.m. Sunday, but Ortiz said he didn’t know who then name of the caller.

At his wife’s funeral in December, a visibly emotional Monjack talked about their relationship and called her his best friend and soul mate. The two married in 2007.

He had said that they had been planning a family and contemplating a move to New York.

Murphy, best known for her major roles in “Clueless,” “Girl Interrupted,” and “8 Mile” in 2002, died Dec. 20, at age 32 after collapsing in her home. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office concluded Murphy’s death was accidental, but likely preventable.

The coroner’s report said that the medications found in her system were consistent with treatment of a cold or respiratory infection. Monjack and Murphy’s mother had reported the actress was ill with flulike symptoms in the days before her death.

An autopsy found no evidence that Murphy abused drugs. Investigators found numerous prescription medications in the actress’ home.

Murphy’s medications, like those of Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith, are on the shelves of your local drugstore, available with a simple trip to the doctor — or doctors — whom you merely need to convince that you need the stuff. Did one doctor prescribe her those meds? Did 10? We don’t yet know. But as a doctor myself, I just kept wondering (and not for the first time): What if doctors were more like librarians? Would Brittany Murphy still be alive?

Let me explain. If you go to your local library and can’t find a book in the stacks, a librarian consults a computer that tells you all you need to know: If the library carries that book, when the book is due back, whether its overdue or lost. If they don’t carry the book, they can tell you which branches do. And — if you’re like me, perpetually returning books late — your local librarian can, with a hint of scorn in their voice, deny you further checkouts until you return that book and cough up your fee. In short, libraries are technologically integrated; gone are the labyrinthine card catalogs in favor of streamlined digital records. Same for banks. Same for airlines.

But not healthcare. The vast majority of doctors in this country are not integrated with each other, with the local pharmacies, or with laboratories. We work in our own silos, blind to the outside world. A patient walks in our door, we escort them to an exam room, jot down what they tell us on loose pieces of paper. We exam them, diagnose their afflictions, and send them on their way — sometimes with a prescription, a referral to a specialist, or a lab test.

But outside of that tiny sliver of time, we know very little: We have no reliable way to know whether the patient is seeing another doctor, been to the emergency room, or even if the patient has been admitted to a hospital for emergency surgery. Sure, some emergency rooms will send a fax with a bit of information if a doctor’s patient ends up in an ER, but for the most part, we rely on patients and their loved ones to be reliable narrators. And sometimes, they are not.

One of the many negative consequences of such fragmentation is how ridiculously easy it can be to get drugs. Most doctors know patients who have desperately angled to get a prescription they don’t need, usually highly addictive pain medicines like Percocet or OxyContin. This is what we call “doctor shopping,” hopping from one physician to the next until they find someone willing to write a script. When the supply dries up, they go to another doctor, and then another. One 53-year-old man in California visited 183 doctors and 47 pharmacies in one year to support his addiction to painkillers.

Pediatricians like me don’t see drug seekers often, but when we do, it’s usually parents using their children as proxy. Several years ago, I assumed care of three siblings whose mother frequently left messages that one child had a cold and needed a cough medicine called promethazine with codeine. Funnily enough, she never wanted me to see her kids, just wanted the medication. I refused her requests, which made her angry, and eventually she stopped calling altogether. But it wasn’t until a year later that I really connected the dots: Her (now ex) husband brought one of the children in to see me. He explained that his former wife had a substance abuse problem, and she was drinking the cough medicine not only for the codeine, which pharmacologically is related to narcotics like morphine and Percocet, but also for the alcohol contained in the syrup. I was completely taken by surprise — for the last time, I promise — which leads to another important point: Without a strong index of suspicion, drug seekers are hard to spot.

Of course, doctors had better be damn sure before we deny our patients access to a medication they sorely need. That’s especially true of patients with pain. The medical mantra over the past decade has been to treat pain aggressively (in 2001, Congress passed, and the president signed, a provision declaring the following 10 years as the Decade of Pain Control and Research). As a result, we’ve been trained to consider pain as a vital sign on par with blood pressure and heart rate. That zeal and those best intentions can sometimes confound our judgment.

But there is a solution far better than good hunches and putting doctors in a pickle between the Hippocratic oath and the Drug Enforcement Agency, and this brings us back to the library. Doctors, pharmacies and hospitals need to integrate prescribing and pharmacy data. Ditch the card catalog for a streamlined technological system.

In a few (but all too rare) instances, this integration is happening. At Kaiser Permanente here in Northern California where I practice, healthcare professionals are linked through electronic medical records. Our data is available securely to any healthcare provider in our system. Not only does that make patient care more efficient, but it also can help a physician, nurse or pharmacist spot suspicious patterns. Like a librarian with books, all we have to do is pull up the patient’s history to scrutinize it. We can do this from any computer, from any office, from any hospital within our system.

There’s another example here in California as well, where it is estimated that 20 percent to 30 percent of California’s drug abusers primarily use prescription drugs. To help counter that trend, the state recently set up an online prescription drug database to track who is taking what. A suspicious doctor or pharmacist has access to that patient’s drug-use history, cutting down considerably on all the guesswork.

Back to Hollywood and Brittany Murphy: If the drugs were hers, it’s conceivable a database like this could have alerted a conscientious doctor or pharmacist to the possibility that she was being overmedicated, and that some of the drugs could have potentially dangerous interactions. That’s assuming, of course, that Murphy obtained these medications from more than one doctor. A database couldn’t have saved her from a pusher MD: a single doctor willing to supply multiple prescription drugs to their patients. These are kinds of doctors who allegedly contributed to the deaths of Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, the kind I would prefer not to call a colleague.

Still, as we spend our time and energy trying to shape healthcare in the next century, it’s worth stressing that a computer system needs to play an integral part. Just think: One day hospitals might actually catch up … to libraries.

She started acting in childhood, but when her career started to take off after her dazzling breakthrough in 1995′s smash “Clueless,” she quickly found herself on Hollywood’s It Girl track. And why not? She was sexy and stunning, with big brown eyes and flawless skin. She slipped easily from blonde bombshell to brunette siren and back again dozens of times. She could break your heart in her wounded, troubled roles, and she had a light, goofy comic presence.

Yet big-time stardom eluded her. Her “Drop Dead Gorgeous” costar Kirsten Dunst went on to meaty dramatic roles and a plum place in the “Spiderman” franchise. Angelina Jolie, who tore up the scenery with her in “Girl, Interrupted,” walked away with an Oscar and a secure spot atop the A-list. Sure, Kate Hudson and Reese Witherspoon had their share of duds but consistently managed to balance crowd-pleasing comic fare with award-baiting serious work. Why not Murphy, a star as beautiful and talented as any in the lot? Why, when others were walking the red carpet at Cannes, was she toiling in voice work? Bad choices, bad luck, bad timing? Or could it have been something else?

It certainly couldn’t have helped that Murphy, a young woman in a harsh, high-pressure industry, was dogged by rumors of drug use and eating disorders. Though she persistently denied both, she had an unfortunate history of erratic public behavior  and had in recent years been looking alarmingly thin.

Maybe that’s why one of her most memorable roles was a character who didn’t need Murphy’s face or body at all — Luanne Platter, Hank Hill’s generous and deeply dim niece on “King of the Hill. ” Her Luanne cried often, gave her affections too easily, and somehow managed to maintain the sunniest disposition in all of Arlen, Texas, a girl whose sorrows only made her wittier and more appealing. She seemed to be a reflection of Murphy herself — dogged by disappointment, smiling graciously through it all.

The last few weeks had been particularly difficult for the actress – she’d been replaced from the cast of the new movie “The Caller” due to “creative differences” and her husband, screenwriter Simon Monjack, was rushed to the hospital with reports of erratic behavior chalked up to a possible asthma attack.

Then yesterday morning, it all ended with a phone call to 911 after her mother reportedly found her collapsed in the shower. She was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angels at 10:04am. The initial word from the Los Angeles coroner’s office is that she died of natural causes, though there seems nothing right or natural about death when you’re 32. An autopsy is planned for this week.

For a woman who won no major awards and never climbed to the top of the Hollywood heap, she leaves an indelibly sweet body of work. She’ll forever be the woman whose “Clueless” character uttered one of the most devastating putdowns in cinema, “You’re a virgin who can’t drive,” the voice of Luanne and her misguided Christian menagerie of Manger Babies. Few actresses of her generation or any other possessed such unselfconscious tenderness. (Contrast Murphy with the hard-shelled, don’t-give-a-damn personas of, say, Megan Fox and Scarlett Johannson.) Imagine how, had she been given the chance, she could have grown into a charismatic character actress with a durable career, a slightly daffier Susan Sarandon. Instead, she’ll be remembered as the ebullient, forever young woman with a knack for playing ladies who didn’t fully fit in this cold world, but who loved it wholeheartedly, unguardedly regardless.

Brittany Murphy, who seems to have thrown away a promising career as an intriguingly offbeat actress in order to become a kooky, lovable poppet, plays a young woman who becomes suspicious of her laid-back but attentive boyfriend (Ron Livingston) when he offhandedly reveals that he used to date a supermodel. Goaded by one of her co-workers (Holly Hunter) at the low-rent TV talk show she works for (its host is played by a boisterous Kathy Bates), Murphy decides to do some snooping around in her beau’s Palm Pilot to find out more about his ex-girlfriends. After stalking them one by one (much ho-hum hilarity ensues), she realizes that she actually likes one of them (Julianne Nicholson, who gives the most forthright and unselfconscious performance in the movie). Imagine that! Ex-girlfriends are people too.

Murphy’s bad behavior is made to look adorable: We know it’s bad, but we’re still invited to giggle at it, to vicariously watch her doing things we might like to do but just don’t have the guts for. That alone wouldn’t be so horrible: In fact, the movie would be a lot more honorable if it simply ran with its sordid convictions. Characters shouldn’t have to be role models — and they’re usually better when they’re not.

But after urging us to groan and chortle at Murphy’s increasingly tangled misdeeds, director Nick Hurran and writer Melissa Carter then have to work overtime to let us know that they in no way approve of snooping around in others’ private property, or of humiliating essentially innocent people who just happen to have at one time dated the current boyfriend of an obsessed Muppet. The movie does this by launching into an exhausting tirade against reality TV and the way it drives people to open up corners of their lives, and those of others, that should be left private. In other words, TV is the problem, not people.

Characters deliver dopey, relevant speeches (“We’re all swimming in the same cesspool — we work in reality TV”) and spurt weird relationship slogans that, incredibly, they seem to believe (“Omission is betrayal!”). Murphy’s character is alternately CareBear cute (at one point, for no really good reason, she does a cartwheel, her skirt flipping up to show off her pink panties and peach-shaped derrière) and devious (as part of her snoopery, she makes an appointment with one ex whom she believes to be a podiatrist — the big har-dee-har-har is on her when the woman turns out to be a gynecologist). The movie can’t distinguish between what’s likable and human and funny and what’s simply repellent. In that respect, it’s just as indiscriminate as the reality TV it shakes its finger at, a case of the pot calling the kettle black — and not a particularly dark black, either.