How digitalization affects elderly care. - Is digitalization the holy grail solution to the issue of increasing costs in Sweden's elderly care?

Abstract: This thesis analyzes how digitalization in elderly care affects cost-efficiency and quality of care. More specifically, digitalization in elderly care is divided into welfare technologies and E-services. The study goes into how well digitalization meets its promises of solving many of our society's future problems regarding elderly care, such as an aging population. In order to analyze this, I have, based on data from Socialstyrelsen, SKR and SCB, created several indexes over how digitalized, how high quality of care and how cost-efficient each Swedish municipality was during 2016 and 2020. The study then takes the differences between these time periods and uses a first difference estimation to calculate the effects of digitalization on quality and efficiency. The theory used in this paper that also forms the basis of the discussion is Dunleavy et al.'s (2005) Digital era governance. The results show that neither digitalization nor its subparts - welfare technology and E-services - have practically any effect on the quality nor the cost-efficiency of elderly care in Sweden. This goes against the hypotheses of this study, that digitalization will affect efficiency and quality positively, but at the same time provides interesting conclusions. Mainly that digitalization on a grand-level does not live up to its "promises" and that more specific measures rather than grand-scale digitalization in every aspect could be the way to go.