Developed by us for Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, Galerie securely captures, shares and annotates photos within the Trust’s hospital and community care centres
Galerie—a first-of-its-kind, bespoke mobile clinical photo capture and sharing application, has been delivered by us 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.
About Node4
Node4 empowers private and public sector organisations across the UK to deliver positive outcomes through technology and innovation. Thanks to a broad portfolio of fully managed services including Business Applications, Modern Workplace, Cloud, Network, Data and Security, clients are empowered to reach their strategic goals.
Node4 fully owns its own a network of data centres, points of presence and operates best-in-class integrated tooling. Alongside strategic relationships with market-leading vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco and Fortinet, Node4 brings together the best options for infrastructure, platforms and applications, tailored to the needs of their clients.
Key to Node4’s success is its friendly, supportive culture, with Great Place to Work® ranking it as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for three years running (2020, 2021 and 2022). Built on an ethos of exceeding client aspirations, Node4’s Exceptional Service as a Standard ensures a service delivered with knowledge, talent and passion.
About Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust (LGT) is a community-focused provider of local and acute care, delivering high-quality services to over one million people across the London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley. We provide whole-life care and are here to support our communities to live healthier lives as well as taking care of them when they need us the most.
Employing almost 7,500 colleagues, affectionately known as Team LGT, we provide services at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, University Hospital Lewisham, and over a dozen community settings in Lewisham. We also provide some services at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup.
Every year, our work includes performing 10,000 procedures in our theatres, bringing seven and a half thousand new lives into the world, carrying out 570,000 visits to patients in their homes or communities, and providing emergency care for more than 300,000 patients arriving in our busy Urgent and Emergency Departments.
LGT is a centre for the education and training of medical students enrolled with King’s College London’s GKT School of Medical Education. We are a training centre for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. We are pioneering new roles that will support the changing needs of our patients and are one of the country’s largest employers of physician associates.
We are committed to working with our partners to deliver the best outcomes for our local communities. This means playing an active role in the South East London Integrated Care System (ICS) and formal partnerships, including the South East London Acute Provider Collaborative, provider partnerships with our local mental health trusts and borough-based boards of the ICS in Bexley, Greenwich and Lewisham. www.lewishamandgreenwich.nhs.uk
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