[Medical photographs: Time saving and data security thanks to a dedicated application]

Medical photography, ubiquitous in plastic surgery, provides essential information to the medical record. Smartphones have become the preferred tool for acquiring these photographs, but cause a data security issue. Furthermore, the management of photographs is frequently manual and time-consuming. The Pixacare software suite has been designed to meet this need in complete security. It includes a mobile application, a web application and a HADS server. The objective of the study was to calculate the time saved by the Pixacare application at the time of data acquisition.

This prospective and monocentric study was carried out in two steps in order to time the acquisition times with the usual method and with the Pixacare mobile application. Each phase included 89 patients recruited in plastic and maxillofacial surgery consultation with four surgeons. The number of patients and the average number of photographs per patient were comparable for each practitioner in both phases.

The acquisition time of the photographic data was divided by 3.77 (P<0.001). With the usual method, the average acquisition time was 259seconds, compared to 69seconds with the Pixacare application, saving 3minutes and 10seconds per patient.

The Pixacare software suite saves the surgeon significant time while ensuring appropriate data security. This study does not take into account the additional time saved by organising medical meetings, the benefits of sharing photographs between healthcare professionals and the efficiency of secure messaging.