About scanfinder

The scan your doctor asked for should not fall through the cracks because working out where to get it was too hard. That is the whole reason this site exists.

Built and maintained by a team of Australian junior doctors. We kept watching the same thing happen: the follow-up imaging that never got done, and almost always for the patients furthest from it. Someone leaves an appointment with a referral and no idea whether the scan is available in their town, how far the nearest machine is, or what it might cost them to find out. Distance, cost and sheer complexity are why people fall out of their own follow-up plans — and none of those are medical problems.

So we built the thing we wanted to hand people: every Australian deserves to know where care is, whatever their postcode. We hold 4,067 imaging sites, 1,856 of them places a referred patient can attend, 411 on the Medicare-eligible MRI list — assembled from the statutory register rather than from anybody's marketing, and written to be read by the person holding the referral.

We are independent, and it matters here more than most places. scanfinder is not owned by, paid by, or affiliated with any imaging provider or group. No practice can pay to be listed, to rank higher, or to have a competitor left off. Providers are ordered by distance and by the facts we hold, never by payment — there is no referral arrangement, no commission and no benefit flowing in either direction, which is also our position under Part IIBA of the Health Insurance Act. If any of that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it is anywhere else.

The site is free, there are no accounts, and we do not track patients. There is no advertising, and we will not build a referral funnel into the big chains — a corporate network and a single-doctor practice in a country town get the same page and the same ordering.

We are deliberately not named individually. The pages here make no clinical claims — nothing on this site tells you whether you need a scan or which scan you need — so a personal byline would lend authority to a question we are not answering. What we stand behind is the data: where it came from, when we checked it, and what we do not know.

If something here is wrong, tell us — the corrections page is the fastest way. We would much rather be corrected than confidently wrong, because someone is going to drive on this.