What Is Integrated Care

Integrated care means healthcare professionals access a complete view of each person's medical history through shared digital records. Clinical teams can see previous diagnoses, medication responses, and treatment outcomes instantly – eliminating the stress of patients repeatedly explaining their conditions. This comprehensive visibility enables preventative care, with clinicians identifying and addressing health concerns before they escalate to acute treatment, using NHS resources more strategically.

Cooperation is one of the principles of integrated care. It might sound like common sense but with how busy healthcare workers are, there is typically limited opportunity do more for a person’s care than just coordinate their treatment from one department to the next until they are discharged.   

The integrated care model, or integrated care framework, plans out the administration, organisation and funding, but also the delivery of service to clients and the clinical help on offer. From there, healthcare providers implement an integrated care system to put these plans into action.

An Integrated Care System (ICS) is a partnership between organisations such as NHS trusts, local authorities, and voluntary services, working together to deliver care that is joined up, person-centred, and tailored to the needs of a population within a specific area of the country. Each ICS is overseen by an Integrated Care Board (ICB), which is responsible for managing budgets, commissioning services, and coordinating and overseeing the delivery of care across the ICS. 

When ICSs were established, England was served by 42 Integrated Care Boards. Following a government-led restructuring programme, six new ICBs were established on 1 April 2026 through the abolition of 12 existing ICBs, reducing the total to 26. The changes are designed to cut running costs and improve efficiency across the system.

In April 2025, NHS England - which is in the process of being absorbed back into the Department of Health and Social Care - published an updated operational delivery framework alongside the Integrated Care Board Model Blueprint. These documents are designed to clarify expectations and strengthen the role of ICBs in driving local accountability, improving population health, and supporting the delivery of the NHS 10-Year Plan. 

The government's 10 Year Plan, published in July 2025, positions integrated care as essential to delivering three strategic shifts designed to transform healthcare across England:

From Hospital to Community – Moving care closer to people's homes through neighbourhood health services, with multidisciplinary teams delivering coordinated support in local settings. This shift reduces hospital admissions, provides earlier intervention, and makes healthcare more accessible.

From Analogue to Digital – Accelerating digital transformation through the NHS App as the "digital front door," shared care records across organisations, and technology-enabled remote monitoring. Digital integration removes administrative barriers while improving data accuracy and accessibility.

From Sickness to Prevention – Refocusing the NHS on proactive, preventative care that identifies health concerns early before they require acute treatment. Integrated teams working across health and social care can address wider determinants of health, supporting people to maintain wellbeing rather than only treating illness. Delivering these three shifts at scale depends on the right technology infrastructure - shared records, interoperable systems, and digital tools that connect organisations across health and social care.

Integrated care systems provide the structural framework enabling these shifts. By connecting NHS trusts, local authorities, and community organisations through coordinated partnerships and shared technology platforms, ICSs create the conditions for neighbourhood-based care, digital transformation, and preventative approaches to succeed at scale.

The UK Government identifies specific benefits of effective integrated care, noting it reduces confusion, repetition, delays, and service duplication while preventing patients from becoming lost within complex healthcare systems.

Patient experience remains central to healthcare quality. Integrated care enables organisations to support more people more effectively while managing resources efficiently through proactive intervention. Reduced repetition builds patient confidence, ensuring care teams remain alert to individual needs and concerns throughout treatment.

Healthcare professionals perform essential work under challenging conditions, yet the patient experience of navigating uncertain diagnoses brings its own difficulties. Health concerns create understandable anxiety and emotional strain. Integrated care acknowledges these realities, prioritising patient wellbeing through coordinated treatment approaches.

Clinical teams collaborate efficiently with immediate access to complete medical records, enabling smooth departmental transitions. This coordination delivers dual benefits: conserving staff time while reducing patient anxiety.

Technology serves as the foundation for effective integrated care, enabling real-time collaboration and data sharing across organisational boundaries. Modern healthcare software breaks down traditional silos between NHS trusts, local authorities, care providers, and third-party organisations, creating joined-up pathways for patient information and treatment coordination.

Integrated care roughly splits into four organisational areas:

• NHS 
• Local Authorities 
• Care providers 
• 3rd party suppliers (charities, volunteer groups, private organisations) 

Software tools offer a wide range of improvements that all four of these sectors can benefit from, including: 

• Better communication 
• Greater coordination 
• Simpler data sharing 
• Easier to send referrals, or equipment requests 
• More transparency for the patient re: treatment or care plans 

Access Rio EPR and Access Mosaic bring together records across health and social care in a single, connected system. Clinical and care teams work from the same information, reducing duplication and keeping records accurate at the point of care.

Access Patient Flow Management gives bed managers a real-time view of patient movements across a hospital, reducing bottlenecks and improving how beds and clinical resource are used. It also supports virtual wards, giving teams visibility of patients receiving care in the community.

Access Adam Care Commissioning is a cloud-based tool for public sector organisations commissioning health or social care. It covers the full commissioning cycle: onboarding, compliance, contracting, provider management, brokerage, invoicing, payments and reporting. Managers can set targets, track workflow and support their teams from one place.

For local authorities, PAMMS (Provider Assessment and Market Management Solution) supports the process of selecting and managing partner organisations from tender. Access Elemental is our social prescribing software, helping GPs and link workers coordinate community-based support for people whose needs go beyond clinical care.

Integrated care directly addresses the fragmentation that has historically challenged healthcare delivery. By enabling organisations to share information seamlessly and coordinate continuously, it ensures patients receive consistent support throughout their care journey – eliminating the risk of individuals falling through service gaps during transitions between providers or care settings.

The UK Government website states that:

"Good integrated care can reduce: confusion, repetition, delay, duplication and gaps in service delivery, people getting lost in the system. "

The patient experience is paramount to healthcare. Integrated care means more people get the right support at the right time, with less repetition and fewer gaps. Proactive, coordinated care also reduces the cost of acute intervention - a significant consideration as demand on NHS services continues to grow. 

For patients, not knowing what is wrong with your health is stressful. Integrated care reduces that uncertainty by ensuring the people treating you have a complete picture of your history and needs, without you having to repeat yourself at every appointment.

For clinical teams, integrated care means the information they need is there when they need it. Transferring a patient between departments or organisations is straightforward, saving time and reducing the risk of something being missed in the handover.

Integrated care is a challenge. This style of care is not a natural development, because each department or service has a role to perform. They exist to be specialists. The challenge then is uniting these specialists to collaborate.   

One of the biggest barriers to integrated care is limited understanding within smaller organisations. Integrated care as official government policy is relatively new. Smaller care providers may not know what their place is within an integrated care system, or what their role is exactly.   

Larger organisations, not used to collaborating with other care groups, may also be complacent about committing to the new integrated care system given the additional work required in establishing such partnerships.  

All organisations have their own targets too. For NHS trusts, they rely on the integrated care board. Their goals for the local area come from the board, so negotiation and cooperation depend on the instructions from the board. The ongoing restructuring of ICBs - with 42 boards consolidating into 26 by April 2026 - adds a further layer of complexity for organisations navigating their place within a changing system. 

For local authorities, they are part of the integrated care system via an integrated care partnership (ICP). The ICP is a committee, made up of the integrated care board and the local authorities. The ICP is a locally-elected democratic group that produces the integrated care strategy for the area, but this is then relies on partner organisations doing as requested.

An organisation may not have the experience or skills to achieve what has been asked of it, or they may have insufficient resources to even offer the services. Smaller organisations can’t be assumed to have the required infrastructure to provide integrated care. These problems take time to overcome, but there are so many upsides to the initial outlay of time, effort, and funding.

Integrated care delivers measurable benefits that address the pressures facing healthcare systems today. With the global population aged 60 and over projected to reach 1.4 billion by 2030 – approximately 17% of the world's population – healthcare organisations face unprecedented demand for services. The World Health Organization identifies this demographic shift as requiring fundamental changes to how care is delivered and coordinated.

Integrated care systems respond to this challenge through proactive, preventative approaches. By identifying health concerns early and coordinating interventions efficiently, these systems reduce the need for acute treatment while increasing capacity to support an ageing population. Time saved through streamlined coordination directly translates to more patients receiving timely, appropriate care.

The benefits of integrated care are most visible at the point where organisations connect. When a GP, a community mental health team and a social care provider share the same information about a person, care decisions are faster, safer and better informed. Duplication falls. Handovers improve. And people are less likely to fall through the gaps between services.

 For NHS Trusts, the challenge has historically been sharing data beyond their own walls. Transferring records between hospitals, or between a Trust and an external care provider, introduces friction; different systems, incompatible formats, information that arrives incomplete or too late. Every delay is time a patient is not being treated. Integrated care, underpinned by interoperable technology, removes those barriers. 

Integrated care sees experts and specialists come together to solve these problems. Data can be shared quickly, communication is easy, funding can be allocated with ease. All of these eliminate hurdles to continuous patient care, giving a better care experience and improving healthcare overall.

Integrated care is a structural and cultural shift, but it cannot happen without the right technology. Shared care records, interoperable EPR systems, commissioning tools and social prescribing platforms are what turn the ambition of joined-up care into something that works in practice, at the point of care, every day.

The NHS 10 Year Health Plan is explicit about this. Digital infrastructure - shared records, the NHS App as a front door, remote monitoring - is one of the three strategic shifts the plan identifies as essential to transforming healthcare. For NHS Trusts, local authorities and community providers, that means investing in systems that talk to each other and give every professional a complete view of the people they are caring for.

Access has been building software for integrated health and social care for over 25 years. Our tools support NHS Trusts, ICBs, local authorities, community providers and voluntary organisations across the integrated care landscape.