About Vårdbetyg

Why we exist

Choosing or switching health centre is one of the more consequential decisions you make as a patient – yet it has been surprisingly hard to do well informed. The official statistics exist, but they are scattered across government portals, tables and PDFs that few people have time to read. We built Vårdbetyg to gather them in one place, calculate honestly from them and present the result so that anyone can understand it in about a minute.

The goal is simple: to let you make a better decision about your care without having to be a statistician.

Who is behind it

Vårdbetyg is built and run by one person: Arvid Pilhall, a developer with a background in technology and data analysis, who started the service out of frustration at how hard it was to compare health centres on real data. It is run as a sole proprietorship, fully self-funded, with no investors and no ties to care providers or public authorities. If you have a question, a correction or want to know more about us, email hej@vardbetyg.se – we are happy to hear from you.

Independence and funding

Vårdbetyg never charges for scores, rankings or visibility. We may sell compiled statistics to care providers, but what that is, who pays and what money can never buy is reported openly on our funding page. It should be verifiable in everything we publish:

• No care provider pays for placement or scores. Rankings and awards are calculated with the same open method for everyone and can be neither bought, influenced nor negotiated away.
• No sponsorship, no ads, no booking commission. We broker no bookings and receive nothing when you choose a particular clinic.
• Every score comes from open, year-stamped sources. The National Patient Survey and the National Board of Health and Welfare’s waiting-time statistics, each marked with its measurement period – never reviews submitted to us, which could be stuffed or manipulated.

If the funding changes, it is stated on our funding page, with amounts and who paid.

Why you can trust our scores

Many comparisons simply rank health centres by their raw average rating. That sounds reasonable, but it is misleading – a clinic where only a handful of patients responded can end up at the top or bottom by pure chance. We do three things differently:

• We adjust for uncertainty. Using Bayesian shrinkage we pull results based on few responses towards the national average, so no clinic tops a list on thin data. We always show the number of responses and confidence intervals next to every figure.
• We say honestly when we do not know. If too few patients responded we set no score at all and write “too few responses”. That is more honest than a figure that looks precise but is not.
• We weigh in objective accessibility. For health centres with waiting-time data the score combines patient experience (70%) with actual waiting times (30%) – not just what people feel, but how easy it really is to get through. A small number of health centres have no waiting-time data, and specialist and emergency clinics have no comparable per-clinic waiting-time statistics at all. There the score rests on patient experience alone, and the pages say so.

We also highlight the health centres that genuinely stand out with awards like Top-rated in the municipality and a place among the best in the country – objective, stamped with the survey year and impossible to buy. The awards exist in the health centre vertical only: in the specialist and emergency verticals the regions report at different organisational levels, so a national leaderboard would compare unlike things. The whole method is open and verifiable – anyone can recalculate it. Read it in detail under Methodology.

Why we show no star reviews

We have deliberately chosen not to let visitors rate clinics with stars. Star reviews on health sites almost always rest on a handful of voices, are easy to sway, and blur what one individual felt with how a clinic works for most people.

Instead we build on the National Patient Survey, a large, systematic measurement where thousands of patients answer the same questions, weighted for how many responded. That is harder to game and more representative than a handful of free-text reviews. Where Google has public reviews we summarise them and weigh them against the Vårdbetyg score, but as a synthesis, not a star list anyone can fill. If you would like to share a view, you are welcome to email us.

Where the data comes from

We do not invent any ratings of our own. Everything is built on official, open data:

• The National Patient Survey – patients’ own ratings, coordinated by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR). We use three of its measurements: health centres, specialised outpatient hospital care and emergency departments.
• The National Board of Health and Welfare’s waiting-time statistics – objective accessibility in primary care, the only source besides the patient survey that enters a score. Waiting times for specialised care and for emergency hospitals are shown as context, never inside a score.
• Regional open data – addresses, maps and unit details from the regions’ own open registers.

We update the scores when new surveys are published. More about each source under About the data.

Your privacy first

Vårdbetyg can be used completely anonymously. You need no account, we never ask you for personal data and we do not track you – no analytics cookies, no ad networks. We never sell placements and make no money from your data. Read more under Privacy policy.

Editorial responsibility and corrections

Responsible for the content of Vårdbetyg is its founder, Arvid Pilhall. We stand behind every score and every award we publish and calculate them openly according to the method, so that anyone can check them.

Found an error, an out-of-date detail or something that looks off? Email hej@vardbetyg.se and we will correct it as soon as we can. The scores also update automatically when new official surveys are published.

Last reviewed: 29 July 2026