This scoping review investigates financial incentives used to promote integrated care.

We focus on integration of care for patients with common chronic conditions.

We identify four financial incentives: Pay for coordination, pay for performance, bundled payments and shared savings.

We analyse the evidence for the (cost-)effectiveness of these financial incentives.

We identify facilitators and barriers to the implementation of these financial incentives.

In response to the increasing prevalence of people with chronic conditions, healthcare systems restructure to integrate care across providers. However, many systems fail to achieve the desired outcomes. One likely explanation is lack of financial incentives for integrating care.

We aim to identify financial incentives used to promote integrated care across different types of providers for patients with common chronic conditions and assess the evidence on (cost-)effectiveness and the facilitators/barriers to their implementation.

This scoping review identifies studies published before December 2021, and includes 33 studies from the United States and the Netherlands.

We identify four types of financial incentives: shared savings, bundled payments, pay for performance, and pay for coordination. Substantial heterogeneity in the (cost-)effectiveness of these incentives exists. Key implementation barriers are a lack of infrastructure (e.g., electronic medical records, communication channels, and clinical guidelines). To facilitate integration, financial incentives should be easy to communicate and implement, and require additional financial support, IT support, training, and guidelines.

All four types of financial incentives may promote integrated care but not in all contexts. Shared savings appears to be the most promising incentive type for promoting (cost-)effective care integration with the largest number of favourable studies allowing causal interpretations. The limited evidence pool makes it hard to draw firm conclusions that are transferable across contexts.

Integrated care

Financial incentives

Shared savings

Bundled payments

Pay for performance

Pay for coordination

Chronic conditions

Provider payment

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.