Sweden
Healthcare System
Sweden provides universal healthcare for all its residents, and emergency care covers any patient from the EEA/EU. The system is mostly funded by local taxes, but responsibility for the healthcare system is divided between national, regional, and municipal level. The national government is responsible for regulation and supervision, counties are responsible for providing and financing healthcare products and services, and municipalities are responsible for other healthcare services such as elderly care, school and home healthcare, among others.
Most healthcare needs are covered by the universal healthcare system, with only 15% of health spending being out-of-pocket. Those are mostly for services that are not fully covered by the system such as pharmaceuticals, dental care and other outpatient care.
It is important to note that reporting for the 110 regional registries covering a variety of diseases is not mandatory.
Administrative or Claims Data
Database: Socialstyrelsen National Patient Register
Sponsor, manager or home institution: Socialstyrelsen.
Primary purpose: The patient register serves multiple purposes. One of its main functions is to track the health development of the population over an extended period. In doing so, it helps to improve the possibilities of preventing and treating diseases. Additionally, the patient register contributes to the overall development of healthcare by providing valuable data and insights. It also enables healthcare providers to monitor the quality of their operations and identify areas where improvements may be needed.
Type of information: Full list of variables can be found here.
Source of Information: Healthcare providers must submit patient information to the patient register monthly, including hospital code and medical area. Data is submitted via a reporting portal or sftp service.
Data level: Patient level.
Number of Records: Unknown.
Date Range: 1964 onwards.
Cancer Areas of Interest: Unknown.
Open data access: Data is not publicly available. Information on how to access the full database can be found here.
Information/Contact for data request: Contact information can be found here.
Registries
Database: Socialstyrelsen Cancer Registry
Sponsor, manager or home institution: Socialstyrelsen.
Primary purpose: To map the occurrence and change of cancer diseases over time.
Type of information: A full list of variables can be found here.
Available type of information: Number of new cases, cases per 100,000, and incidence sorted by age, sex, cancer area and year.
Source of Information: The data is sent from hospitals to six regional cancer centers for coding and registration. Once the material has been verified, it is then transmitted to the National Board of Health and Welfare to become part of the cancer registry. The registry is updated annually.
Data level: Patient level.
Available data level: Regional and national level.
Number of Records: 60,000 cases registered every year [1]
Date Range: 1970 onwards.
Cancer Areas of Interest: All.
Open data access: Data is partially publicly available. The data can be accessed here. Information on how to access the full database can be found here.
Information/Contact for data request: Contact information can be found here.
Database: Socialstyrelsen Cause of Death Registry
Sponsor, manager or home institution: Socialstyrelsen.
Primary purpose: To describe the causes of death and track mortality trends in Sweden.
Type of information: Age at death in years at the time of death, year of death, clinical or forensic autopsy information, examination before death in hospital information, external autopsy information, date of death, place of death, multiple causes of death according to the ICD, including ULORSAK and KAP19/KAP17 combinations, date of any eventual operation, whether surgery was performed within 4 weeks before death, underlying cause of death according to ICD, among other information. A full list of variables can be found here.
Available type of information: Number of deaths, deaths rates and deaths by 100,000 people sorted by diagnosis, age, sex and region.
Source of Information: The death certificates are sent by doctors to the Tax Agency or the Police, and then are sent to the Socialstyrelsen.
Data level:Patient level.
Available data level: Regional and national level.
Number of Records:
Date Range: 1969 onwards.
Cancer Areas of Interest: All.
Open data access: Data is partially publicly available. Data from 1969 to 1996 can be accessed here and data from 1997 onwards can be accessed here. Information on how to access the full database can be found here.
Information/Contact for data request: Contact information can be found here.
Database: Medicines Registry
Sponsor, manager or home institution: Socialstyrelsen.
Primary purpose: The objective of the pharmaceutical registry is to enhance patient safety within the pharmaceutical industry.
Type of information: Social security number: a personal identification number (PNR) according to certain predetermined rules; Quality of social security number: a variable that shows the quality of the PNR; Age at the end of the year: calculated as year of expedition minus year of birth; Sex; Patient's place of registration at the time of dispatch: county, municipality, and parish (only counties and municipalities from 2016); Patient's place of registration at the time of dispatch: county and municipality; Date of shipment: date when the patient bought the item; Date of prescription: date when the prescription was issued; Start date for current high cost period; Patient's accumulated co-payment before dispatch: sum of co-payments that the patient has paid during the ongoing high-cost period (only costs within the pharmaceutical benefit are included in input); Billing period: year and month in which the shipment was invoiced; Order type/sales method: indicates how the product has been prescribed; Transaction type: indicates how the item has been prescribed (coarser categories of non-type); Origin of the prescription: how the prescription arrived at the pharmacy; Type of benefit within the framework of the pharmaceutical benefit: goods defined as "within the benefit" are discounted according to the benefit ladder; Starter pack: indicates whether the patient has received a starter pack or not; Flag indicating whether a change of the prescribed item to a medically equivalent alternative at the pharmacy is allowed or not; Code indicating the type of change that has taken place during dispatch, from the prescribed drug product to a generic drug, alternatively to a parallel imported or parallel distributed drug (only filled in if a change has taken place); Product type; Number of packages that have been picked up: for dose-dispensed medicines, the number of packages can be a decimal number; Prescribed number of packages, if this differs from the dispatched number. Dosage text: free text containing information on dosage, use, and purpose; Patient's cost (excluding VAT): calculated as total cost minus benefit cost; Benefit cost/County cost (excluding VAT): amount that the county council pays for goods included in the pharmaceutical benefit; Total cost (excluding VAT): includes both the part that the patient himself pays and the part that the county council pays; VAT rate: commercial goods etc. 25%, food 12%, pharmaceuticals 0%; Additional cost (excluding VAT): amount the patient has to pay if he/she chooses a drug other than the cheapest equivalent alternative; Price per pack, including VAT; Issuer category code/prescriber category code: the pharmacy's code for occupational. Data dictionary can be found here.
Available type of information: Drug groups and ATC codes for all ages, drug groups for children 0-17 children; filtered by annual data, monthly data divided by age, monthly data divided by region, drug groups, ATC codes, regions, sex, measure, year and month.
Source of Information: The pharmaceutical register exclusively obtains its data from the E-health authority, which requires all pharmaceutical trades to report their sales data. When a prescribed medication is dispensed, pharmacies must also furnish supplementary information to the E-health authority. The E-health authority, in turn, forwards information regarding prescription-based shipments to the National Board of Health and Welfare.
Data level: Patient level.
Available data level: National and regional level.
Number of Records: About 100 million per year.
Date Range: 2005 onwards.
Cancer Areas of Interest: Unknown.
Open data access: Data is partially publicly available. Available data can be accessed here. Information on how to access the full database can be found here.
Information/Contact for data request: Contact information can be found here.
