Invoice Validation Reviews. Delivered.

Ongoing partnership with Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB leads to huge savings.

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The total savings found and refunded stands at almost £1.8m

No financial risk to ICB with our contingency model

Minimal input from ICB, maximum savings

The Challenge

Staffordshire & Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care Board (ICB) found that they were one of the highest cost providers per capita compared to peer organisations. However, having discussed with them regarding errors Liaison had found in other ICBs of overcharges from CHC suppliers, the ICB were not confident and wanted reassurance that that CHC and AP invoices were being validated to ensure their costs were correct.

Managing records for deceased patients, accurately aligning hospital admissions with local policies, misallocation of funding streams and addressing duplicate or inconsistent entries in AP and CHC statements adds an additional layer of complexity to reconciliation efforts, and specialised experience could help identify supplier overcharges to reduce their overall CHC costs.

The ICB has been working with Liaison Financial to carry out a series of invoice validation reviews and recover any overspend from external suppliers on its behalf.

The Solution

To support the ICB in addressing these challenges, we implemented a structured review process. Our contingency-based model meant the ICB were assured that there was no financial risk to them, with costs only incurred when savings were recovered.

Following an initial meeting to define the scope and data requirements, we analysed CHC and AP invoices to identify overpayments, system issues, and provider-level discrepancies. Our findings were clearly presented, and our recovery team managed all external supplier engagement, securing refunds or credit notes.

By providing monthly progress updates and requiring minimal input from ICB staff, we alleviated concerns about additional workload.

The Outcomes

The total savings found and refunded stands at £1,739,983.
The largest sum found in a single review found £484k of agreed savings.
Part of the review consisting of Duplicates & Statements secured savings of £642,702.
We found a total of £183k from one supplier alone.
Our team have developed a lasting and trusted partnership with the ICB, handling all communication with suppliers and recovering funds with no additional workload to their teams.

We partnered with liaison to really get under the skin of our use of CHC, because we recognised that we were a significant outlier nationally on the costs of CHC. The team are great; we’d have the usual kickoff meetings and regular catch ups. The relationships were good, and certainly it was helpful for us having extra capacity. Having the heavy lifting taken by the Liaison team was really important. All we had to do was to go through the outputs and agree on the conclusions, then they did the recovery work. It was either going to cost us nothing, or was going to save us money, and it saved us money. Where there is a capacity constraint or a learning gap in either those two scenarios, I would encourage my colleagues, to consider Liaison Group.

Paul Brown

Chief Finance Officer, Staffordshire & Stoke-on-Trent ICB

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