Australia is rolling out lung-cancer screening with LDCT in 2025. Most of your eligible patients don't know.

Australia announced the National Lung Cancer Screening Program in 2023, with rollout beginning from mid-2025. Eligible high-risk patients will receive biennial low-dose CT (LDCT) of the chest, fully funded under Medicare.

Eligibility — the three thresholds

• Age 50-70.
• Current or former smoker (quit within the last 10 years).
• Minimum 30 pack-year history.

Pack-year history is the half of the eligibility check most GPs don't have on file. A 'pack-year' is one pack of 20 cigarettes per day for one year. Someone smoking 10 cigarettes a day for 60 years has a 30 pack-year history. Someone smoking two packs a day for 15 years has the same threshold.

Why the cohort is invisible in most patient lists

Clinical software typically captures 'smoker / former smoker / non-smoker' as a binary. Pack-year history requires the patient's smoking history in detail — start age, average daily intake, quit date if applicable. Most patient records have none of this.

Result: when the screening program comes online, GPs will struggle to identify which of their patients qualify. The patients themselves will mostly not know they qualify either. The 5-year mortality benefit of LDCT screening (around 20% reduction in lung-cancer deaths per the NELSON trial) requires that identification to happen.

What to do before mid-2025

Capture the smoking history properly during routine consults. Get the start age. Get the average daily intake. Get the quit date. The patient app makes this trivial — they fill it once, the data sits with their profile permanently, the eligibility flag fires automatically the day the screening program opens.