Access HSC and BearingPoint to tackle virtual ward integration

Access Health, Support and Care (HSC) has partnered with consultancy firm BearingPoint to help integrated care systems (ICSs) deliver more integrated and sustainable virtual wards.

The partnership brings together Access HSC’s technology platform, Access Intelligent Care Platform (AICP) with BearingPoint’s experience to work across all 42 ICSs through the national virtual wards programme.

It aims to support virtual wards that are embedded in local systems, by helping to break down silos and tackle fragmentation at a national scale.

Steve Wightman, general manager for Access Healthcare, said: “Virtual wards must be more than an extension of the hospital.

“They should be designed around people’s lives, supported by tools that bring services together. That is what AICP is built to do, by connecting services, streamlining pathways and giving professionals the insight they need.”

The challenges that remain around virtual wards include fragmented discharge processes, limited access to real-time information, and overstretched community teams continuing to slow progress.

AICP is designed to help tackle these issues by connecting information from across health, social care, mental health and community services, giving professionals a more joined-up view of a person’s care and helping teams to coordinate holistic support more effectively.

The AICP went live in May 2025 at Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust and Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, with the aim of helping to reduce administrative burden, improve care coordination and lead to faster support at home.

Dan Roulstone, director at BearingPoint, said: “Integrated virtual wards offer a real opportunity to rethink how care is delivered across different settings.

“But delivering on the business case and making tangible improvements for patients and professionals depend on more than just scaling technology.

“It is about supporting frontline teams to lead change, and ensuring digital solutions like AICP are developed with, not only for, the people who use and deliver care.”

Access HSC and BearingPoint will support ICSs to implement virtual wards in line with national frameworks, without duplicating what already works.

This will help facilitate the ambition in the NHS 10 year health plan, published on 3 July 2025, to shift from hospital to community, delivering more care from people’s homes.

The plan says that systems need to “better understand their virtual ward capacity and plan with the ambulance service and 111 to how to use this capacity more effectively.”

It adds that the hospital at home programme will be expanded within the first three years of the plan and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s digital programme will be expanded to consider more medical-grade wearables.

Meanwhile, in February 2025, NHS England commissioned an evaluation to measure the impact of its national virtual wards initiative.

There are more than 12,000 virtual ‘beds’ operating nationwide and in May 2024, NHSE announced proposals to increase access to virtual wards in a bid to cut avoidable hospital admissions and reduce emergency department waiting times.

The Access Group has recently been announced as a co-headline sponsor of Digital Health Rewired 2026, alongside Optum.