Thank you to those customers who joined us for our recent DAWN User Regional Workshop (Midlands) in Leicester.  This informative workshop provided a great opportunity to share ideas, learn alternative methods of best practice and help customers get the most out of their DAWN software.

The presentations were both interesting and informative with great feedback received from attendees. The write-up for the session can be downloaded here: 4S DAWN Regional User Workshop (Leicester) Proceedings 2016 as a pdf or read below.

Staff from 4S DAWN welcomed everyone to the meeting and gave a brief overview of company developments and customers from the range of disease areas offered by 4S DAWN including:

• Rheumatology
• Dermatology
• Gastroenterology
• Multiple sclerosis
• Heart failure
• Haematology

The workshop saw a wide spectrum of DAWN users in attendance, including nurses, consultants, administrators and IT.

Nicola Freeman, Rheumatology Nurse Specialist
Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH)

Nicola gave a presentation on BCH’s use of DAWN rheumatology software (DAWN RH) for paediatric patients on a day to day basis. DAWN RH was implemented at BCH in 2001 and acts as a single point of access for patient information instead of multiple systems, as was previously the case.

As an established customer, the presentation prompted some good conversation about ways of using DAWN that other customers could replicate within their adult rheumatology services, including using the ‘Patient View’ button and sending patient summaries to GPs.

Problems with manual monitoring were highlighted including the need to watch trends and not simply individual results, something that is particularly difficult with manual monitoring. Storage and accessibility were also highlighted as issues along with patient safety.

Two multidisciplinary meetings per week enable the team to review and enter patient information including all paediatric Core Outcome Variables to track disease activity and to update diagnosis and medications if required.

Paediatric Core Outcome Variables:

• Height
• Weight
• Pain VAS
• Global VAS
• CHAQ/HAQ Score
• Physician’s Global Score

The introduction of the Patient View button which provides a summary of the patient (see image below), has enabled them to reduce the preparation and meeting length substantially as they no longer need to access multiple sources to pull together the information required.

BCH are now looking at establishing clinic sheets for other diseases including SLE, JDMS and scleroderma. An ICE interface automatically populates the DAWN system with blood results from the lab and they are in the process of setting up an inbound patient demographics interface from the Lorenzo system.

Nicky’s presentation was followed by a discussion forum that saw delegates break into smaller groups in order to discuss and then share the outcomes of their discussions on the following three topics:

The challenges of biosimilars and how they are affecting your service

• Little difference in cost but departments are encouraged to put new patients onto them

• For some services, existing patients are informed and given a choice as to whether they want to transfer to biosimilars

• More data is needed – not enough data on biosimilars to reassure patients of their efficacy when discussing possible transfer

• Resourcing within departments is an issue as more new drugs mean lots of different monitoring requirements that need to be met

• DAWN customers felt it was important to be able to determine between specific drugs, including the generics, on DAWN in order to be able to audit their efficacy e.g. Inflectra / Infliximab

Key safety benefits offered by DAWN software

• Highlighting abnormal results and seeing trends
• Much quicker handling of the patient record
• Auditing – important to see actions have been completed against patients and who completed the actions
• All the patient information is in one place and accessible to multiple people
• Referrals – easy to see dialogue between healthcare professionals, all recorded in DAWN and the security of being un-editable by others
• Generally a safe and robust system to store and manage patient data

Key challenges and changes your service will face over the next 5 years

• Managing expectations of stakeholders – getting ‘buy-in’ across the Trust – buying the system is not the end, need clinical engagementm resources and investment of time to ensure DAWN is up to date and accurate to ensure departments receive maximum benefit from the software
• Growing demand of patient population and matching that demand to current resources
• Ensuring the importance of DAWN gets on the Trust’s agenda, particularly integrating with other systems
• Governance issues between primary and secondary care
• Robust processes need to be in place to manage staff change-over and training on DAWN to ensure consistency and quality of input/output on DAWN

Alistair Stewart, 4S DAWN Clinical Software
Developments in DAWN

Alistair presented the new DAWN Patient Reporting Tool, which are patient completed, online questionnaires that patients can complete at home or in the waiting room prior to their clinic appointment.

Patients are issued a PIN number generated by and recorded in DAWN. Patients are then able to access the DAWN Patient Reporting Tool via smartphone, tablet or PC to complete and submit the form. The results from the submitted form are automatically added to the DAWN patient record (see image below).

A confirmation email is sent to the patient notifying them of their scores.

“Reporting outcome measures via a patient portal is increasingly becoming the norm for routine patient care. The DAWN Patient Reporting Tool not only facilitates remote monitoring of patients but also provides a patient disease activity timeline. This helps to focus clinic consultations in many ways”

Dr Wong, Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth

Alistair also covered some of the key product updates included in the latest releases of the DAWN software, primarily:

Timed Message

New ‘Timed Message’ functionality has been added to the DAWN system in this release. This functionality allows pre-defined messages to be sent to groups of either patients or healthcare professionals, either by email or by SMS/text message, at a pre-defined time on specific days of the week.

Hyperlinks from Front Screen

Hyperlinks from Front Screen Tallies to List Views. DAWN can be configured to display a set of significant tallies on the front screen.

New Password Reset Process

When you log in using the temporary password, you are immediately prompted to change your temporary password for a new one of your choosing. The new Change Your Password form is much more helpful than before.

Heather Stevenson, 4S DAWN Clinical Software
Training Sessions

A training session on the DAWN system was held in the afternoon and covered four key areas, Reporting on your patient population; DAWN questionnaires; Timed messages (email and SMS text messaging); and Flagging test results.

This provided an excellent opportunity for customers to learn more about using their DAWN system in new ways, refresh existing knowledge and ask questions about various areas of the DAWN system.

Feedback at the end of the day was very positive and those who attended found the workshop very beneficial, particularly the training session and the opportunities to talk with colleagues and fellow DAWN users to share experiences and common challenges.