Provider Collaboratives: Supporting ADHD Assessment with Tech

The statistics are stark. Since 1993, common mental health conditions among working-age adults have risen from 15.5% to 22.6%. Perhaps most concerning, 13 times more people were waiting for an autism assessment in September 2025 compared to April 2019. Behind each of these numbers is a child or adult navigating an overstretched system, often experiencing deteriorating wellbeing while waiting for assessment and support.

Professor Peter Fonagy, who is chairing the review, has committed to examining the evidence with care and testing assumptions rigorously. His aim is to provide government with advice that is "proportionate, evidence-based, and capable of improving people's lives." For health and social care providers working on the frontline of these services, this focus on practical, evidence-based approaches resonates deeply.

One element of NHS transformation that shows promise for tackling these challenges is the provider collaborative model. These partnership arrangements bring together multiple NHS trusts, independent healthcare providers and voluntary sector organisations to work across geographic areas with a shared purpose.

How Provider Collaboratives Work

NHS-Led Provider Collaboratives for specialised mental health, learning disability and autism services were established to take responsibility for care pathways and budgets for their populations. Led by an NHS trust, these collaboratives work with families and communities to develop clinically-led approaches to designing and delivering specialised services. There are currently 47 such collaboratives operating across England.

The principle is straightforward: enhance collaboration between providers to deliver more efficient, sustainable services while improving care quality through partnership with people with lived experience. For neurodevelopmental services specifically, this model offers potential to address the fragmentation that too often characterises assessment pathways.

The challenges facing ADHD services exemplify the pressures across neurodevelopmental assessment more broadly.

Patchy Provision and Geographic Variation

National surveys have consistently described adult ADHD services as "patchy," with significant geographic variation in provision. The CATCh-uS study, published in 2020, identified 44 dedicated adult ADHD services across the UK, yet only 12 of these provided the full range of treatments recommended by NICE guidelines.

The Human Cost

The consequences of this service scarcity are felt acutely by individuals and families:

• Long waiting lists increase the risk of academic underperformance, educational failure and comorbid mental health conditions.
• Some parents are resorting to private treatment simply to get their children the care they need.
• The costs of private assessment are leading to severe hardship, with families unable to afford regular meals.
• People's mental health often deteriorates while waiting for support.

The Coordination Challenge

The assessment process itself compounds these difficulties. In many areas, children and adults seeking an ADHD diagnosis must navigate multiple disconnected services. A GP referral might trigger separate assessments by community mental health teams, CAMHS services and educational psychology services. Information requests are duplicated across agencies. Families spend hours chasing different organisations for updates. Professionals find themselves managing administrative tasks and tracking down records rather than focusing on providing care.

A Typical Scenario

Consider a typical scenario: An 8-year-old child showing signs of ADHD requires input from their GP, school SENCo, social services, and ultimately a specialist diagnostic service. Each organisation operates its own systems. Referral forms are sent by post. Assessment notes sit in separate databases. When the school completes their observations, they're unaware that the GP has recently documented similar concerns. The family receives conflicting information about where their child is in the process and what happens next.

This fragmentation isn't just inefficient. It's exhausting for families already under considerable stress. It delays access to support at critical developmental stages. And it prevents services from understanding demand patterns and allocating resources effectively.

This is where technology platforms designed specifically for care coordination can make a tangible difference. Solutions like Access Intelligent Care Platform (AICP) demonstrate how digital infrastructure can support the collaborative working that provider partnerships need.

The Real Challenge: Coordination, Not Clinical Expertise

The fundamental challenge in neurodevelopmental pathways isn't a lack of clinical expertise. It's the coordination problem inherent in bringing together multiple agencies, each with their own systems and processes, to support a single child or adult through assessment and onwards into treatment.

What Digital Platforms Can Deliver

A unified digital platform can address coordination challenges by:

• Providing a single view of each person's journey across all involved services, making referrals instantly visible to all relevant teams.
• Eliminating duplication through shared assessment information that all professionals can access.
• Enabling genuine care planning where every professional sees the same up-to-date information.
• Offering family transparency through secure portals showing exactly what stage the assessment has reached.
• Supporting proactive communication with automated notifications that keep teams informed.
• Delivering system-wide visibility so service managers can identify bottlenecks and allocate resources strategically.

Benefits for Families and Professionals

For families, this transparency is transformative. Rather than spending hours on phone calls trying to establish where their child is on a waiting list, they have clear sight of progress and next steps.

For professionals, the benefits extend beyond administrative efficiency. When service managers can see the entire pathway across a provider collaborative's footprint, they can make evidence-based decisions about resource allocation and capacity planning.

Importantly, technology platforms can also facilitate early support during waiting periods, connecting families with local support services, psychoeducation resources and peer networks while assessments are ongoing.

The benefits of coordinated digital platforms extend beyond initial assessment. For adults with ADHD, ongoing treatment management presents its own coordination challenges, particularly around shared care arrangements between specialist services and primary care.

Managing Long-Term Treatment

Many people with ADHD require medication management alongside psychosocial interventions. NICE guidelines recommend that once diagnosis is made, psychoeducation delivered and medication initiated and titrated to a maintenance dose, routine prescribing and monitoring can transfer to primary care. However, this requires:

• Robust information sharing between specialists and GPs
• Clarity about responsibilities for monitoring
• Systems to flag when clinical review is needed
• Seamless handover of treatment plans

Digital care coordination platforms support these shared care arrangements by maintaining a single source of truth about treatment plans, medication regimens and monitoring schedules. When a specialist adjusts treatment, the GP immediately sees the updated plan. When monitoring indicates a need for specialist review, the system can automatically trigger the appropriate referral pathway.

For people living with ADHD, this coordinated approach means better continuity of care. They're not caught between services, unsure who to contact when issues arise. Their care professionals have the information they need to make safe, informed decisions. And the system can identify when people might be falling through gaps in provision.

The government review led by Professor Fonagy will examine what is driving rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services, exploring why people are increasingly turning to the NHS for support and how appropriate current interventions are. Its findings, due in summer 2026, will inform the NHS 10-Year Plan's commitment to tackle the mental health crisis in adults and children.

The 10 Year Health Plan: Three Fundamental Shifts

The review sits within the broader context of the government's 10 Year Plan, which aims to create "an NHS fit for the future" through three big shifts:

• From hospital to community: Moving care closer to home through neighbourhood health teams and integrated services
• From analogue to digital: Harnessing technology to improve access, coordination and outcomes
• From sickness to prevention: Focusing on early intervention and addressing health inequalities before they escalate

For neurodevelopmental services, these shifts are particularly relevant. Provider collaboratives already operate at community and system level, bringing together local services to deliver care closer to home. Digital platforms enable the coordination needed for effective community-based pathways. And earlier identification through better-connected services can reduce the need for crisis interventions later.

The Medium Term Planning Framework, published in October 2025, reinforces these priorities with specific targets for reducing long waits for autism and ADHD assessments by optimising existing resources and implementing new guidance. The framework explicitly calls for high-functioning systems to establish integrated teams for mental health, learning disabilities, autism and ADHD.

A Critical Opportunity

This presents a critical opportunity. Provider collaboratives are already established as the vehicle for delivering specialised mental health and neurodevelopmental services. Digital platforms that enable effective coordination are available and proven. The question is how quickly these can be deployed at scale to support the transformation the review will undoubtedly recommend.

Investment Needs Infrastructure

The government has committed substantial investment, including 8,500 additional mental health workers and expanded NHS Talking Therapies. But workforce and capacity alone won't solve coordination challenges. Services need the digital infrastructure that allows these additional professionals to work together effectively, sharing information seamlessly and providing families with the transparency and communication they need.

Addressing the Core Challenges

As Dr Sarah Hughes, Chief Executive of Mind, noted in response to the review announcement: "More people need help than services can see, people's mental health deteriorates while they wait, and when people do get access to support it is not always appropriate to their needs." Technology platforms that support better coordination, clearer pathways and more effective resource allocation can help address all three of these challenges.

Provider collaboratives offer the organisational model for integrated neurodevelopmental services. Digital care coordination platforms provide the infrastructure these collaboratives need to function effectively. Together, they represent a practical path toward the evidence-based improvements Professor Fonagy's review is seeking to identify.

For the children, young people and adults currently waiting for assessments and support, these aren't abstract policy concepts. They're the difference between navigating a fragmented system alone and experiencing coordinated care that recognises their needs and keeps them informed throughout their journey. That's the transformation technology can and needs to enable.