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. 

Initially structured around an integrated care framework, ICSs were formally established under the Health and Care Act 2022. Since then, the roles of both ICSs and ICBs have continued to evolve in line with national priorities. 

In April 2025, the soon-to-be-abolished NHS England 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.

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 seamless 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 

Software like Access Rio electronic patient records (EPR) and Access Mosaic allow for a centralised collection of records across health and social care. This avoids any needless duplication of notes and helps keep records both accurate and up to date.

Access Patient Flow Management allows a bed manager to monitor and control patient movements through a hospital. This avoids bottlenecking in certain wards and better priority usage of beds and clinicians. It also supports virtual wards, giving teams a clear picture of those receiving care in the community.

Perhaps the most comprehensive scope comes from Access Adam Care Commissioning. This is a cloud-based management tool; designed for the public sector when commissioning health or social care. It handles onboarding, compliance, contracting, provider management, brokerage, invoicing and payments, and reporting. The company using it can manage workflow, support staff teams, and it allows managers to set targets and provide direct guidance to employees. 

Beyond this there are tools for local authorities such as PAMMS (Provider Assessment and Market Management Solution), to help them choose the right partner organisations from tender, as well as Access Elemental – a social prescribing tool designed to help GPs coordinate with link workers in the community to provide holistic, personal care away from a clinical setting.

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. Those in need of help are the highest of priorities, and with integrated care you can provide more help to more people, all at a quicker rate, and save money in the process by being proactive with care. There’s less repetition, and more confidence that you’re being treated by people who are alert to your needs and concerns.  

Care workers do an essential job, and their work is often challenging, but it can be difficult being a patient too. Not knowing what the problem is with your health can be scary and emotionally draining. It’s important that healthcare accounts for these concerns and reassures people that their wellbeing is a priority. Integrated care can achieve all of this by allowing for overlapping treatment.

Clinical teams can work together much faster, all the data and clinical notes needed are readily available, and transferring a patient from one department to another is simple to organise. It saves staff time and patients from worrying – two very big wins.

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.  

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 systems are that these new integrated care opportunities can be properly introduced. The systems are what tie the organisations together. The organisations cooperate effectively with their care provision for the wider population. Patients get excellent care with improved access, due to greater efficiency, and public health improves.   

The biggest of these organisations will be NHS Trusts. The benefits of integrated care for the NHS involve the sharing of medical information. Data and notes passing between departments in a hospital is commonplace, but sharing data between hospitals or with external healthcare providers gets more difficult. Different patient software can mean difficulty transferring notes. A file type might not be supported. The data might be there, but it attaches itself to the wrong boxes for the information required. Whatever the technical issue, time lost waiting on information to be provided is time that a patient is not being treated.   

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.