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One model, one language for joined-up care
Explore the shared language of health and care: every concept, relationship, and diagram of a model conformant to ISO 13940:2026.
Illustrative use cases
Three worked scenarios showing the conformant model doing its job: carrying meaning intact across a discharge, a referral, and the secondary use of care data.
Use case: referral and service directory signposting
A GP encounter surfaces a social need. The conformant model carries that need — with its reason — through a care service directory to the right community provider.

One model, one language for joined-up care
Explore the shared language of health and care: every concept, relationship, and diagram of a model conformant to ISO 13940:2026.
- About ISO 13940:2026 (ContSys)
  ISO 13940:2026 is the second edition of the international standard defining the system of concepts needed to describe health and care businesses and to support continuity of care across clinical and social settings.
- The role of a conformant model
  A model conformant to ISO 13940 acts as the shared semantic foundation on which information systems, integration programmes, service specifications, and analyses are built — the fixed point that keeps them all saying the same thing.
- Illustrative use cases
  Three worked scenarios showing the conformant model doing its job: carrying meaning intact across a discharge, a referral, and the secondary use of care data.
  - Use case: hospital discharge into social care
    An older person leaves hospital after a fall. The conformant model lets the ward, the discharge team, and the community social care provider describe one continuing episode in one vocabulary.
  - Use case: referral and service directory signposting
    A GP encounter surfaces a social need. The conformant model carries that need — with its reason — through a care service directory to the right community provider.
  - Use case: shared information and secondary use
    Records created in hospitals, general practice, and social care organisations are aggregated for planning, research, and policy — and stay comparable, because they were recorded against the same concepts in the first place.
- Continuity of care: the organising goal
  Continuity of care is what the concept system exists to protect: the ability of a subject of care to move between services, organisations, and sectors without losing the thread of their care.
- Social care as a first-class citizen
  The second edition of ISO 13940 is the product of extensive international work to bring social care fully inside the concept system, so that integrated care can be modelled — and delivered — without a semantic seam between sectors.
- Alignment with the DOLCE upper ontology
  Every upper-level concept in the model is aligned with DOLCE — the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering standardised in ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023 — giving the concept system a formally validated backbone.
- How the model fits the wider standards estate
  Conformance to ISO 13940 brings built-in coherence with the record, terminology, and architecture standards a modern care system already depends on.
- The master diagrams
  The full-size master diagrams behind ISO 13940:2026: the architecture of the concept areas, the activities of a continuity of care process, and the DOLCE alignment, drawn in UML notation following ISO 24156-1.
- General terms
  The foundational terms that recur throughout the model — care, health, party, role, resource, and the concepts of knowledge, information, and data.

Use case: referral and service directory signposting

A GP encounter surfaces a social need. The conformant model carries that need — with its reason — through a care service directory to the right community provider.

Signposting fails when the need identified in one place cannot be expressed in the terms the directory, or the receiving service, understands. The model closes that gap by giving the need, the request, the directory entry, and the referral a common semantic backbone.

Figure 1. From encounter to matched service

Concepts at work

The consultation is a care contact — an encounter in which a health condition assessment identifies not a clinical issue but a social need.
A request for care is raised, carrying its reason for request for care so the receiving end knows why, not just what.
A care service directory lists care service offerings in the same concept system, so matching need to offering is a semantic operation rather than a free-text guess.
A referral initiates a new episode of care with the matched community provider.
A continuity facilitator mandate can span the whole journey, keeping one accountable point of oversight however many providers become involved.

The same pattern scales from a single practice signposting to local voluntary services all the way to national directory infrastructure — the concepts do not change with the size of the directory.