Radiologists are resorting to fax machines or snail mail to register lung cancer screening results after struggling to connect their practice IT with the national screening register.

The National Lung Cancer Screening Program launched this July with the goal of preventing 12,000 cancer deaths over a decade via early detection.

It involves GPs identifying eligible patients aged 50-70 with a history of heavy smoking and referring them to radiologists, who conduct low-dose CT scans and upload the results to the National Cancer Screening Register (NCSR), which handles screening results for bowel, cervical and lung cancer.

However, some radiologists were refusing to participate because of the time, cost and difficulty of integrating their IT with the NCSR, according to the Australian Diagnostic Imaging Association (ADIA), which represents private radiology clinics.