The National Institute for Health Development introduced a newer version of the database statistika.tai.ee (available in Estonian and English) when publishing health statistics – the database with the updated design retained the current structure, but the search function and overall stability got improved. The implementation of the new version is necessary to ensure that the data is always available.
The statistics is gathered from the medical registers of the institute, health statistics collected from health care providers, health behaviour surveys and other institutions that process health-related data. The new version of the database contains all the data that was available in the previous one.
The database already contains 1724 tables, which gives an overview of Estonian health sector and people’s health status. The data are grouped by areas:
- population,
- morbidity,
- use of health services and reasons for treatment,
- health resources and their use,
- health and health behaviour,
- statistics on medicines,
- data for health profiles, and
- statistics on Estonian National Health Information System.
The search now works over the database – previously it was only topic-based, which hindered finding of the needed data. There are two ways to find the data you want, either by browsing the structure of the database tree and finding a topic of interest, or by entering a search term or the code of a specific table into the search box. In order for the search, it is recommended to add an asterisk at the end of the abbreviated search term (e.g. alco*, which finds keywords as alcohol, alcoholic, etc).
As before, the database allows to compile data tables, to organise the data between rows and columns as needed and to download them in a suitable format. In addition to tables, you can create various graphs and save them. The data in the database is machine readable (API capability).
The release calendar informs about the release times of new statistics. The data of new cases of malignant neoplasms has the longest time series currently – data have been published since 1968. The most recent topic in the database is the harm reduction service’ statistics that was released in January, and new data will be added every quarter.