DANBURY — Under fire for suing more patients over unpaid bills than any hospital in Connecticut, Danbury Hospital is now changing its policy when going to court to claw back outstanding debts.

“After careful review, we are changing our collection practices on outstanding medical bills to be more empathetic to our patients,” said Amy Forni, the public relations manager for Nuvance Health, a $2.4 billion network approved by regulators in May. “We understand this can be complicated, and we will continue to work with our patients to best manage any financial hardships.”

Forni would not elaborate, except to say the hospital is working with a third-party debt collector to formalize the new policy.

What this means for the state’s most litigious hospital remains to be seen as health care advocates and a top lawmaker continued to question why Danbury sued 6,400 patients in small claims court in 2016 — a figure nearly half of lawsuits Connecticut hospitals filed that year to recover unpaid bills.

“Certainly I would welcome changes in policies that make (Danbury) more empathetic as well as more caring and careful, but I would like to know whether they regard these past policies as effective,” said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal. “I am going to seek an explanation from the hospital as to these policies of suing patients.”

It was Blumenthal who made national headlines in 2003 as Connecticut’s Attorney General when he accused Yale-New Haven in a lawsuit of denying needy patients aid from an ample free-bed fund, and subjecting patients to ‘aggressive debt-collection practices.’

As a result, a Yale-New Haven executive told Hearst Connecticut Media that since then the hospital hasn’t taken a patient to court in years.

Blumenthal’s intention to question Danbury Hospital follows headlines last week that Danbury “stuck out like a sore thumb,” in the words of one health care advocate, compared to the state’s other 27 hospitals.

In a single-day snapshot in 2017, for example, Danbury had 600 active small claims cases against patients, compared to the next-highest total of 82 at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford.

The rest of Connecticut’s 26 hospitals each had several dozen-to-no active lawsuits, according to new data from the UConn Health Disparities Institute.

The hospital, which is part of a newly formed network that stretches from the Sound Shore to Hudson River, is involved in the same combination of rising health care costs and higher insurance deductibles that are turning hospitals across the country into some of America’s most aggressive debt collectors.

Meanwhile on The News-Times Facebook page, former patients complained about Danbury Hospital’s aggressive debt collection practices, including one woman who said she spent four days in the hospital for a heart condition.

The woman said she had been working with a financial counselor when the hospital changed its policy and sued her.

Publicly available small claims court documents tell her story many hundreds of times over.

The records show people from the city and across Connecticut having their wages garnished and being ordered to make regular payments — often of $35 per week, to satisfy their hospital debts.

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said the hospital’s business was the hospital’s business, although the number of lawsuits in the data seemed high to him.

“They are a nonprofit, and this is not a case of them going after profit but one of them trying to sustain their operation,” Boughton said. “In terms of the litigation I don’t know whether that has changed under Nuvance or whether the litigation is warranted.”

A top health care advocate was more critical.

“I do think it is of concern, (because) anything that creates a barrier to access and interferes with the patient-provider relationship puts the health and well-being of residents at risk,” said Patricia Baker, president and CEO of the Connecticut Health Foundation. “That’s not the relationship a hospital would want with its community.”

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342