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, the company says.
Anenta explains that its real-time contract and waste management platform – which is responsible for managing over 450,000 scheduled and ‘on-demand’ collections of waste annually, ‘identifies and flags discrepancies caused by mis-charged, duplicated, or incorrectly invoiced services issued by waste collection providers’. Enabling it to act on behalf of GPs and ICBs, challenging invoices before they are paid, the technology resulted in over 4,000 invoices being challenged in 2023 alone, reportedly saving the NHS over £1.3 m.
Separately, Anenta says, over £1.69 m has been saved thanks to its work to recover over-billing linked to instances where historic contracts allowed waste collection providers to bill for more waste than they actually collected.
The company explained: “Here, uplifts in sharps waste volume – resulting from ‘flu and COVID-19 jabs – set new weekly contract billing base rates, which meant 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. Our 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.”
While rare, Anenta says ‘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, and sharps container billing now reflects average usage levels for individual GP surgeries, with any excess billed based on the number of extra sharps containers collected. This alone has delivered an estimated annual saving of over £1.02 m to ICBs and the NHS in England. Billing for bags of healthcare waste is now based on a per bag collected basis, reducing monthly billing by up to 70%, and 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.
Anenta currently acts on behalf of over 9,000 GPs, and 9,000 pharmacies in England. It says it handled over 39,400 healthcare waste management queries in 2023.
