Node4 has delivered Galerie—a first-of-its-kind, bespoke mobile clinical photo capture and sharing application to Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust. Directly connected to the NHS Spine, the new app will allow for secure, encrypted sharing of patient diagnostics – a first for the NHS.
Launched at the end of 2024, the Trust anticipates its dermatology department will be the principal user. However, Galerie is also expected to help podiatry, cancer, burns, tissue viability, and plastic surgery teams, as well as community-based services, work smarter and faster to deliver better patient outcomes.
“Clinical photos need to be taken and accessed around the clock, but our department’s services are only available during regular working hours,” explains Sally Cooke, Head of Design, Photography, and Reprographics at Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust. “The NHS did not—and still does not—have a national solution to this problem and none of the existing applications we looked at met our requirements. These included Trust oversight and ownership of captured media, storage safety and consent to photography. We also needed a connection into the NHS spine to ensure consistent demographic data.”
Although the Trust had several Electronic Patient Record (EPR) solutions in place, the reality was that there was little or no integration between them. This made it harder to deliver joined-up care and track treatment progress—particularly for patients who moved between acute and community settings.
Taking all these factors into consideration, Sally Cooke and Julian Beeton, the team’s senior designer, commissioned Node4 to develop Galerie to meet their needs in a safe, secure, and appropriate way. Galerie achieved this by being:
· EPR system-independent: Galerie will still work if the Trust changes or updates its EPR system. There’s no need to rebuild the image library again from scratch.
· User independent: Galerie is not tied to a single user. If a doctor leaves the Trust or the NHS, the images stay within the application environment and do not leave with them.
· Compliant with patient record retention: Galerie ensures the Trust stores electronic patient data in line with current guidelines and legislation.
· Able to provide detailed image annotation capabilities: Galerie enables clinicians to annotate individual images when uploaded and allows further notes to be added by other colleagues at a later point.
· Directly connected into the NHS Spine: Galerie is the first application of its kind to directly connect clinical data from the NHS spine and store it in the Dataverse on the NHSmail Shared Tenant. This enables clinical staff to pull patient demographic data and create records.
“Galerie works on a phone, laptop or a smart device and looks identical in each instance. The only difference is that when Galerie launches on a phone, it also launches the camera so the user can take a photo,” explains Julian Beeton, Senior Designer, Photography, and Reprographics at Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust.
He continues: “But the key point here is that the photos never touch the user’s camera roll or photo gallery—they stay within the application environment and don’t end up on a user’s mobile device, helping to protect against GDPR breaches. Galerie also restricts how photographs are shared via email, only allowing them to be forwarded to authorised accounts such as nhs.net emails and other approved DCB1596 compliant domains from partner organisations.”
User Case One: Streamlining Initial Assessments of Potential Skin Cancer Cases
Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust runs clinics for patients on a cancer pathway who need moles and other skin anomalies urgently assessed within two weeks—and where speed of access and ability to share images are vitally important. “Galerie's detailed annotation capabilities, ease of use, centralised photograph database and straightforward interface make it easier and more efficient for clinicians to track changes and for everyone involved in a patient’s treatment to remain fully informed,” Sally Cooke explains.
User Case Two: A Single Photographic Database for Hospital and Community Care
Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust’s community care and hospital teams often work together on patient treatments. Two of the most common collaborations are around foot health and tissue viability. Clinical photographs taken in a hospital and community environment would previously have been stored on different systems, making it harder to quickly assess patient needs and provide joined-up care.
“By storing community and hospital photos in Galerie’s central database, clinicians from both teams will be able to quickly determine a patient’s treatment history and work together to improve patient care,” observes Sally Cooke.
