Developed by Node4, Galerie securely captures, shares and annotates photos within the trust's hospital and community care centres. 

The new app, which is directly connected to the NHS Spine, will allow for secure, encrypted sharing of patient diagnostics. 

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.  

Sally Cooke, dead of design, photography, and reprographics at Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust, said: ‘Clinical photos need to be taken and accessed around the clock, but our department's services are only available during regular working hours.

‘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.'

Cooke and Julian Beeton, the trust'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. 

Beeton said: ‘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.'

He added: ‘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.'