How scanfinder is built

The spine of this site is the Medicare Location Specific Practice Number (LSPN) register: the statutory list of imaging practices accredited to claim Medicare benefits, with the modalities each is accredited for and the dates that accreditation runs.

On top of that we join the Australian Government's Medicare-eligible MRI and PET location lists, state health department directories, healthdirect's national health services directory, provider websites, and hand-verified batches. Today that gives 4,067 imaging sites, 1,856 of them places a referred patient can attend, 411 on the Medicare-eligible MRI list.

Three rules do most of the work. First, accreditation beats marketing: if the register says a practice is accredited for CT and its website advertises MRI, we show CT as accredited and the website's claim separately, marked as coming from the provider. Second, lapsed accreditation is not advertised — when a modality's accreditation window has closed we drop it, which removed advertised-but-lapsed modalities from 467 sites the day we added the check. Third, a practice a patient cannot attend does not get a page: specialists' in-rooms equipment is real accreditation but it is not somewhere to take a referral.

Distances on town pages are straight-line from the centre of the town, which is always a little shorter than the drive. Where we have road times we say so explicitly. We would rather show a conservative number than an optimistic one.

We publish what we do not know as carefully as what we do. Opening hours exist for a minority of practices and we never imply hours we have not seen. We hold no price data of any kind. Billing appears only where healthdirect records a provider as bulk-billing, attributed and hedged, and the absence of a billing note means we know nothing — not that a practice charges.

Each page's date at the foot is the date its content last changed, not the date the build ran.