Vital Stats
Relevant Product Characteristics
- This product is designed specifically with mental/behavioral health professionals in mind.
- The leadership or management behind this product includes at least one mental/behavioral health professional. In addition, at least one technical leader or manager has an extensive background serving the health care industry.
What Is This Product?
Dreamaker is a video analysis software platform designed by and for mental health providers to edit, analyse, comment and collaborate on video and audio recordings of client sessions. It is a highly supportive tool to facilitate the needs of clinical supervision, training, and educational research. Dreamaker enables you to place markers at key times, apply tags customized to your clinical paradigm, share the video with invited collaborators to participate in shared commenting.
Dreamaker is also highly usable for individuals who utilize video or audio in their sessions, by giving them a tool to organize, store and review, replay, and rapid scan/slow your videos. You can analyze your sessions by tagging key moments which allows you to then summarize, search, and reorganize the highlights of your session — which, in turn, can help you gain a new perspective on client patterns. This program takes shared video analysis to a next level. An audio transcription feature is also available, and the program will be releasing additional feature sets in the near future.
The interface is intuitive and easy to understand; and the feature set is focused without being limiting. Dreamaker’s unique and highly applicable features lends itself to non-clinical uses, so there is a basic level that does not offer a BAA, but the professional and enterprise level includes a BAA. The professional account starts at an affordable $20 a month. There are discounted student level accounts available as well.
We are excited that this tool effectively supports supervision and training with support from an industry designed system (again, the for mental health practitioners by mental health practitioners aspect.) They offer a feature set that pairs high level functionality with easy usability and also provides solutions to profession specific challenges. The company’s culture also highly supports ethical decision making in regards to their security features; they have a clear understanding of their role as a HIPAA Business Associate, and we believe they hold the best interests of client privacy and security as paramount and this is clearly reflected in the features and functionality of their product.
This product offers a free service tier or a free trial account:
We encourage all clinicians interested in this product to try out the free trial or experiment with the free tier to see if it suits your needs.
If you discover anything of concern that isn’t addressed in this review yet, please tell Liath about it at [email protected].
- Click here for the free trial or free service tier information→. Important note about Business Associate Agreements: This product does not seem to offer a Business Associate Agreement for the free trial or free service tier. Do not use client information when testing the product.
Caveats
Caveats are criticsms of the company or product that we feel are relevant to your risk management or other important considerations.
None
Notes
Notes cover points where the product can’t ensure compliance or ethical action for you. These help you know what your part of the compliance puzzle looks like when using this product. A high note count usually correlates with a feature-rich product, and not necessarily with a product that has problems.
1) Be mindful of adding collaborators and set policy on collaboration as appropriate.
One of the key features is being able to share the videos and allow collaborators to comment. Collaborators can be removed without losing the history of comments, and they can also choose to exit a shared project. Collaborators can only edit their own notes.
Collaborators only need a free account which does not come with a BAA, so the individual who has the paid account will need to manage the security needs. When working with a high volume of shared videos (ie. supervisor and supervisee) we recommend that both parties have a paid account and an executed BAA in place.
To help maintain client confidentiality, Dreamaker does have a “privacy guard” which is a reminder system for you and those with whom you are sharing videos of a sensitive nature. For those who are sharing: there will be a checkbox to mark that a file is confidential, a confirmation to review who you are sharing the video with to help you verify you have the correct contact info. For those who are receiving: there will be a privacy reminder prior to opening the video and shared commentary that designates the file(s) as confidential and prompts the collaborator to ensure they can view the file(s) in a secure manner.
2) Be mindful of clinical notes section.
There is a project notes section to help you have an easily accessible summary of important clinical information. Just remember, this is not an electronic records system and is not a substitute place for your accessible, timestamped and locked clinical note.
3) Accept the invite to obtain the BAA.
With the professional and enterprise level, you will be invited to complete the BAA after creating your account. If a BAA is needed please make sure that you look for the invite and accept and do not dismiss the invite. If you accidentally dismiss or ignore the invite, you may directly request the BAA from the company. The trial version does not include a BAA, so please only input client information with the paid version once the BAA is in place.
4) Password management.
This program does not support 2 factor authentication, so we recommend changing the settings of the password from the standard 8 character to a passphrase containing at least four words and unique to this system. We would highly recommend pairing with a password management system to enable a complex passphrase and continual updates.
5) Exporting Analysis Notes in Compliant Manner.
You can have a CSV file that will export the analysis notes from yourself and all of the collaborators. The notes will export in a CSV file which then can be accessed in a Google sheet, Excel or Numbers file.
You will need to make sure that the manner in which you export the CSV file is complaint and follows your HIPAA security policies & procedures regarding the systems and devices that you export to.
6) Uploading Video Files in complaint manner.
The software is not designed to record the sessions, but they have a simple drag and drop feature that supports most common video and audio formats. When recording and saving videos prior to upload, you will want to make sure that you do so in a manner that complies with your HIPAA security policies and procedures.
7) Accessing Audit Logs.
If there is a time when you suspect a breach, or need to perform an audit, you can request logs directly from the company. Dreamaker can immediately disable the account (if needed), help you research when and where access occured, and if any CSV documents were exported. The support provided by the company is one of the great features of using software designed by and for healthcare professionals.