Origin was designed as a full-fledged, unified electronic medical record/practice management system, optimized to handle all of the needs of radiology practices. The Origin Radiology Information System (RIS) is based on years of research and a commitment to flexible, best-of-breed, and affordable solutions. Origin manages patients, handles referrals over the web, maintains medical records — including documents, forms, dictations, and images — and administers finances in one seamless package. It forms the technological foundation for an efficient, state-of-the-art, and cost-effective medical practice.
Origin was designed from the ground up, based on the actual process of medical care. It supports the care workflow with minimial intrusiveness, and it pays for itself with astonishing speed.
Origin’s designers have known from the beginning that communication, particularly the referral-response cycle, is integral to medical care — caregivers don’t exist in a vacuum. Thus, medical referrals are built-in, not tacked-on: Origin-run facilities can receive referrals and deliver reports over the Internet, right out of the box.
Medaxis was founded in 2000 to create a true Electronic Medical Record (EMR) that answers the needs of all the players in health care: patients, providers, payers, and government. Medaxis’s product, Origin, unifies the process of care in a single system that handles clinical data, diagnostic imaging, order entry, and practice management in one seamless whole.
Medaxis’s founders are scientists, health care providers, administrators, and practitioners from leading institutions, particularly UCLA. These individuals have worked together for years on the clinical, business, technical, and practical aspects of health care and health care informatics, funded by grants from government and private agencies. They founded Medaxis in order to bring the benefits of their research into practical use.
The culmination of the team’s research was an 18-month period of intensive modeling of the process of care, which resulted in creation of a fifty-foot-long Scroll that mapped this process. Using the Scroll as a foundation, the Medaxis team defined an ideal EMR — which Medaxis considers to be a process of care supported by appropriate technologies — before a single line of code was written. Because of this process modeling, Origin supports physicians and administrators with minimal alterations in the way they practice medicine.
The unique design and in-depth understanding of the health care process (what is done to a patient), supported by a set of intuitive and intelligent technologies to improve the quality of care and outcomes (what eventually happens to a patient), improves physician performance, profitability, and job satisfaction. It also reduces the inefficiencies, redundancies and mistakes that plague health care today. Quality of care is improved, costs are reduced, and care is tailored to individual patient needs.
Origin carries necessary information through each patient encounter, from scheduling to doctor’s report and notes to order entry (for specialist referrals, diagnostic tests, and prescribing medication) to coding and finally to billing — all automatically. Patient data are entered only once, during scheduling, and carried through the entire process. People who interact with the EMR have access only to the appropriate information that relates to their role and function in the process of care.
Origin also handles secure communication of medical information, taking advantage of the Internet to unify each patient’s record across multiple providers. It automatically notifies referring physicians when a report is available, and can display the relevant data and report even if that physician does not use any EMR. Internet access is all that is required.
Medaxis was awarded a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a software architecture that automatically extracts patient data from any EMR — regardless of location, database, or computer code — generates a list of patient problems, and displays information in ways that support diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making. This distributed information architecture for clinical practice is designed to fit seamlessly with Origin, adding value utilizing unique and powerful technologies, and outpacing competitors currently in the marketplace.
Origin is currently running health care facilities in several states, providing remote referrals, practice management, EMR, and medical imaging services (RIS/PACS) to very active and busy health care facilities.
