16(40)
4.1
Data
The data comes from the Dental Care Register at The Swedish Social
Insurance Agency linked to geographical variables collected at Statistics
Sweden. The Dental Care Register covers all dental care produced at clinics
that are subscribed with the dental care benefit system, which is 96% of all
clinics in Sweden.
The Dental Care Register contains diagnosis, treatments, visits and prices
among other variables. The price variables includes the price charged by
the dentist for each service, the gross price for all treatment items in one
visit and the total price paid by the patient, i.e. the price net of allowance
and any reimbursement. The Dental Care Register covers over 47 million
treatments during the studied period. See table 1 for summary statistics.
The geographic variables contain information about the clinics' location,
given by the midpoint coordinate of a 100 x 100 meter square around the
clinic. The coordinates are defined within the national horizontal reference
system RT 90. All data covers the period July 2008–June 2011.
4.2
Descriptive statistics
Table 1 provides some summary statistics for dental care in Sweden
during the studied period June 2008–July 2011. There are roughly four
times as many private clinics as public clinics and consequently, the
majority of patients visit private clinics. It is noteworthy that the Swedish
Dental Service, i.e. the public clinics, is responsible for children’s dental
care. However, the data only covers patients aged 20 years and above.
The total number of patients for public clinics is therefore understated in
table 1.
