It is a quite recent phenomenon in Denmark, that patients or more general consumers of social- and healthcare services can decide which hospital/care centre they want to use. Previously they had no influence on this decision as the place of care/treatment was decided according to the county where the consumer lived. However, in order to create a higher degree of flexibility and create some kind of competitive forces between the different hospitals/care centres it was decided that the choice should be free for the consumers. This was a huge thing in Denmark and it is really something different from the norm. In order to empower the consumers to make a good rational choice regarding place of treatment some information on waiting lists (which are often very long for some treatments in Denmark) is supposed to be made public available on the net. Each hospital is required to provide information on waiting lists, type of treatment they offer and related types of information on the web. Thus ICT is used to empower consumers of social- and healthcare services and this is only one more reason why there are so much focus in policy papers on creating user-friendly web-services that are accessible for all users (incl. elderly people, people with no web-experience and disabled people with special needs). Possibly, this development will accelerate the development towards more user friendly and accessible information services.
There is no tradition for family care in Denmark. Denmark has a huge public sector taking care of all kinds of caring and support and consequently the family is not neglected but they are mostly involved at the social level. Home care is 100% financed through taxes at municipality level.. ICT is not considered especially relevant in this respect, but it should be noted that many of the informal arrangements supported financially by municipalities (and government) are directed towards ICT-training activities.
There is no distinction between general AT and ICT that are needed by special groups. ICT is treated equally to traditional technologies. There are some of pilot activity in relation to tele-health. In Denmark the so-called "internet-medic" has been developed, which is a on-line web-based system where the users can look up information on symptoms and illnesses and get access to a doctor The system is quite well known and has been exported to other European countries.
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