Challenging healthcare waste overbilling saves GPs almost £3m

GPs in England have saved almost £3 million on their healthcare waste bills thanks to the intervention of technology provided by leading independent healthcare waste management company, Anenta.

Responsible for managing over 450,000 scheduled and ‘on-demand’ collections of waste per year, Anenta’s cutting-edge, real-time contract and waste management platform identifies and flags discrepancies caused by mis-charged, duplicated, or incorrectly invoiced services issued by waste collection providers.

Instantly flagging any discrepancies in billing, its technology enables Anenta to act on behalf of GPs and ICBs, challenging invoices before they are paid. This resulted in over 4,000 invoices being challenged in the 2023 alone, saving the NHS over £1.3m.

Separately, over £1.69m has been saved thanks to Anenta’s work to recover over-billing linked to instances where historic contracts allowed waste collection providers to bill for more waste than they actually collected.

Here, uplifts in sharps waste volume – resulting from flu and Covid-19 jabs – set new weekly contract billing base rates, which meant that over 100,000 bags and containers of waste were billed for, even though they were not produced by the GP surgeries, or collected by the vendor.

Anenta’s forensic approach to invoice validation identified the discrepancies, which were subsequently challenged, resulting in an agreement from the waste vendors to issue credit notes against the excess billing.

Although rare, contract billing ratcheting clauses can result in wildly inflated charges. One GP practice was billed for 52 sharps containers on a weekly basis, even though its sharps waste volume frequently dropped to just one container per week. This alone would have cost the GP’s ICB an additional £998,000 over the course of the year, had it not been identified and addressed by Anenta.

Thanks to Anenta’s work, waste vendors have now agreed not to implement permissible contract billing ratcheting.

As a result, sharps container billing now reflects average usage levels for individual GP surgeries, with any excess being billed based on the number of extra sharps containers collected. This alone has delivered an estimated annual saving of over £1.02m to ICBs and the NHS in England.

In addition to this, billing for bags of healthcare waste is now based on a per bag collected basis, reducing monthly billing by up to 70%, delivering a reoccurring saving of up to £678,000 per year.

Graham Flynn, Director at Anenta commented: “Our waste management platform has been developed to analyse, examine, check and scrutinise every single billable item charged by waste collection providers. This process ensures that irregularities are quickly identified so that overbilling can be disputed by our team.

“Without this approach, ICBs could find themselves facing excess GP waste charges running into millions of pounds, which is why vigilance is required to help the NHS save money for use on the delivery of front-line services.

Anenta currently acts on behalf of over 9,000 GPs, and 9,000 Pharmacies in England. Handling more than 39,400 healthcare waste management queries in 2023, Anenta has saved the NHS over £640,000 in NHS man hours alone.

Combined with its work to streamline the process of healthcare waste management, Anenta has saved the NHS in excess of £13m over the past five years and has enabled over £35.3m of efficiency savings through its streamlined Pre-acceptance clinical waste, and Duty of Care audits for GPs and Pharmacies.

For more information about Anenta, visit www.anentawaste.com or call 033 0122 2143.