• Last updated: Mon, Nov 27, 2023Status: Ongoing
• Helena Svaleryd, Jonas Vlachos, and Jaroslav Yakymovych

The impact of private and public providers of vaccination

This project analyzes whether private and public healthcare providers differ in how they facilitate access to vaccination, particulary how they prioritize between groups and whether personal network connections matter for early vaccination. The results will be informative regarding the costs and benefits of private and public healthcare provision in a crisis situation when the contracting environment is inherently weak. Since the crisis organization builds on the organization during normal times, the results will also have implications for healthcare organization more generally. The project will contribute to our understanding of the consequences of the organization of an intervention – vaccination – for the uptake and timing of vaccination.

We will characterize individuals as easy and hard to reach using registry data available to SWECOV. Previous studies show the probability of vaccination varies with cognitive ability, age, income, education level, country of birth and sex. We will further explore which factors are important for the willingness to become vaccinated using rich individual-level data, including socio-economic and demographic variables as well as individuals’ abilities and traits. Instead of relying on assumptions about which characteristics matter for whether and how fast an individual gets vaccinated, we will use machine-learning techniques to distinguish between hard-to-reach and easy-to-reach individuals. Information on when individuals had access to vaccine according to the priority rules is obtained from a survey directed to the regions in the spring of 2022. Deviations from the priority rules could, for example, involve prioritizing individuals connected to the firm or individuals in influential positions and their family members. Family and workplace connections will be constructed using administrative data from Statistics Sweden. The necessary discretion and the incentives to give priority to valued clients and contacts might exist among both public and private providers.