How Scanfinder checks its clinic information

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 4,056 imaging sites, 1,863 of them places a referred patient can attend, 411 on the Medicare-eligible MRI list.

Three rules do most of the work. First, the accreditation register sets the confirmed scope: if it lists a practice 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 approximate from the centre of the town. Where we have road times we say so explicitly.

Uncertainty stays visible. Opening hours appear only when we have a source for them. Billing appears when healthdirect records a provider as bulk-billing; a missing billing note simply means the directory has no sourced policy for that clinic.

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