Health and Disability

The Danish system offers lessons for policymakers in the United States, where medical harm remains widespread and the mechanisms for addressing it are often cumbersome and adversarial. The Danes’ primary focus is on helping patients who have been hurt by the health care system. While the reams of data gathered from claims aren’t used to publicly rate doctorsand hospitals, or to systematically search for bad actors, they can help flag providers who have repeat errors and may pose a risk.

For the past three years, ProPublica has asked patients who’ve been harmed and their family members for their stories. We’ve heard the same things time and time again: After a medical error comes a struggle to get straight answers and accountability. Financial compensation for additional care, pain, disability or lost work is reserved only for a relative few.

The U.S. system for compensating injured patients — medical malpractice lawsuits — effectively shuts out patients when the potential damages are small. Proving negligence, the usual standard for winning compensation, is difficult. There are scant incentives for doctors and hospitals to apologize, reveal details about what happened, or report errors that might unveil a pattern.

Denmark offers a radically different alternative, as do similar programs in otherScandinavian countries and New Zealand. To be sure, these countries have nationalized health care systems, unlike the public-private model in the U.S. But alternative responses to patient harm have been tried on a smaller scale. Virginia, for example, has a program designed to compensate for severe neurological childbirth injuries that is similar in some ways to the Danish system.

Common to all these programs is a commitment to provide information and compensation to patients regardless of whether negligence is involved. That lowers the bar of entry for patients and doesn’t pit doctors against them, enabling providers to be open about what happened.