Patients having to wait longer than the target time to be discharged from hospital is beginning to drop with the integration of health and social care, according to Health Secretary Shona Robison.
Ms Robison said evidence on the ground indicates progress is being made to combat the problem of delayed discharges, also known as bed blocking.
She was speaking at Holyrood after announcing an extra £200 million over two years to support the 32 local NHS and social care partnerships set up as part of the move towards integrated services.
Partnerships have to set out their plans to merge health and local authority care services by April 1 and will then have a year to fully implement them.
Current targets for delayed discharges state nobody should wait more than four weeks from when they are clinically ready to be discharged, with that target set to come down to two weeks in April.
Ms Robison said two-thirds of health and social care partnerships are likely to meet that target next month.
She said: "Nationally we are now moving into implementation and in a couple of weeks' time the first of our new integrated partnerships for health and social care will go live.
"Already from around the country we can see examples of local commitment to improvement through integration, such as Glasgow's ambitious programme to reduce delayed discharge and improve intermediate care.
"It's not just Glasgow, across the country partnerships have started to behave as if they were already integrated.
"Local information tells us that delayed discharges are starting to come down, two-thirds of partnerships looked well placed to deliver the two-week target at April."
Labour health spokeswoman Jenny Marra welcomed the progress made but said there was still a long way to go and warned of "nervousness" about the integration of budgets.
She said: "When you have one budget struggling to deliver a service and another budget under constraints too, pulling them together does not automatically deliver the results we would want."
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