Enabling patient-physician continuity in Swedish primary care: the importance of a named GP. A registry-based observational study.

Background: Continuity of care is important for patients with chronic conditions. Assigning patients to a named GP may increase continuity.

Aim: To examine whether patients who were registered with a named GP at the onset of their first chronic disease had higher continuity of care at subsequent visits than patients who were only registered at a practice.

Trends in Remote Health Care Consumption in Sweden: Comparison Before and During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background: Remote assessment of respiratory tract infections (RTIs) has been a controversial topic during the fast development of private telemedicine providers in Swedish primary health care. The possibility to unburden the traditional care has been put against a questionable quality of care as well as risks of increased utilization and costs. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a changed management of patient care to decrease viral spread, with an expected shift in contact types from in-person to remote ones.

Patient choice, entry, and the quality of primary care: Evidence from Swedish reforms.

Policies aiming to spur quality competition among health care providers are ubiquitous, but their impact on quality is ex ante ambiguous, and credible empirical evidence is lacking in many contexts. This study contributes to the sparse literature on competition and primary care quality by examining recent competition enhancing reforms in Sweden. The reforms aimed to stimulate patient choice and entry of private providers across the country but affected markets differently depending on the initial market structure.

[Telemedicine services associated with higher use of regular primary care in a Swedish region].

Since 2016, a number of companies offering primary care services via chats or video calls have entered the Swedish primary care market. This is the first study to investigate whether these services replace other primary care services or if they induce more care and potentially even increase the workload of traditional caregivers. Using administrative care register data from a Swedish region, we find that the use of telemedicine services is associated with higher use of other primary care services (visits and telephone/mail contacts).

Socioeconomic distribution of GP visits following patient choice reform and differences in reimbursement models: Evidence from Sweden.

Objective: This study aims to analyse changes in the socioeconomic distribution of GP visits following primary care patient choice reform, and to compare their magnitude and direction in pure capitation, versus capitation/activity-based mixed, provider reimbursement settings.

Methods: We compute absolute and relative concentration indices using total population registry data from three Swedish counties (N∼3.6 million) two years pre, to two years post, reform.

Extending decomposition analysis to account for unobserved heterogeneity and persistence in health behavior: Income-related smoking inequality among Swedish women.

This article suggests an enrichment of the standard method for decomposition of the concentration index to account for unobserved heterogeneity and persistence in health behavior. As the underlying regression model in the decomposition, this approach uses a dynamic random-effect probit that both consider individual heterogeneity, using a Mundlak type of specification, and applies a simple solution to account for smoking persistence. I illustrate the suggested approach using a panel of Swedish women in Statistics Sweden's Survey of Living Conditions for one vital health-related behavior, smoking.

A general method for decomposing the causes of socioeconomic inequality in health.

We introduce a general decomposition method applicable to all forms of bivariate rank dependent indices of socioeconomic inequality in health, including the concentration index. The technique is based on recentered influence function regression and requires only the application of OLS to a transformed variable with similar interpretation. Our method requires few identifying assumptions to yield valid estimates in most common empirical applications, unlike current methods favoured in the literature.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Inequality Measurements: Understanding the Value Judgments.

Measuring and monitoring socioeconomic health inequalities are critical for understanding the impact of policy decisions. However, the measurement of health inequality is far from value neutral, and one can easily present the measure that best supports one's chosen conclusion or selectively exclude measures. Improving people's understanding of the often implicit value judgments is therefore important to reduce the risk that researchers mislead or policymakers are misled.

Forgetting to remember or remembering to forget: a study of the recall period length in health care survey questions.

Self-reported data on health care use is a key input in a range of studies. However, the length of recall period in self-reported health care questions varies between surveys, and this variation may affect the results of the studies. This study uses a large survey experiment to examine the role of the length of recall periods for the quality of self-reported hospitalization data by comparing registered with self-reported hospitalizations of respondents exposed to recall periods of one, three, six, or twelve months.

On correcting the concentration index for binary variables.

This article discusses measurement of socioeconomic inequalities in the prevalence of a health condition, in response to the recent exchange between Guido Erreygers and Adam Wagstaff, in which they discuss the merits of their own corrections to the frequently used concentration index. We first reconcile their debate and discuss the value judgments implicit in their indices. Next, we provide a formal definition of the previously undefined value judgment in Wagstaff's correction.

Breaking bad habits by education - smoking dynamics among Swedish women.

In a dynamic Two-Part Model (2 PM), we find the effect of previous smoking on the participation decision to be decreasing with education among Swedish women, i.e. more educated are less state dependent.