Century City Doctors Hospital Swims Against Tide, Opens ER

In a county that has seen nine emergency rooms close in the last three years, a Century City hospital bucked the trend Wednesday by reopening its ER.

Health officials are hoping the emergency room at Century City Doctors Hospital will relieve stress on ERs throughout the area, where seriously ill patients often must contend with long waits and overworked doctors and nurses.

“We’ve gone nine steps back and we’re going one step forward,” said Carol Meyer, acting director of Los Angeles County’s Emergency Medical Services Agency.

As it stands, 75 emergency rooms serve about 10 million people in Los Angeles County. Hospitals have been overtaxed by a growing population, high rates of uninsured patients, and patients’ increasing reliance on emergency rooms for routine care.

Often, busy facilities divert paramedic traffic to neighboring hospitals. According to data released by the Emergency Medical Services Agency earlier this year, some major hospitals in the region were closed to ambulances more than half the time.

“To say that the situation is at a breaking point is not an exaggeration,” said Dr. Marc Eckstein, medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department. “At most emergency departments, you will wait many hours to be seen.”

Two years ago, Century City Doctors Hospital, previously known as Century City Hospital, was owned by Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp.

The hospital was closed in April 2004, then acquired by Beverly Hills-based Salus Surgical Group, which invested about $100 million to renovate the 178-bed facility. It reopened in October and has served about 1,000 patients, said Randy Rosen, chief executive of Salus Surgical Group.

In 2001, the hospital’s emergency room treated 11,000 patients, according to the state’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. It is now expected to treat 1,200 patients a month, or 14,400 annually. That is a fraction of the total seen in emergency rooms countywide, Meyer said, but it will ease pressure on local facilities.

“We were incomplete without an emergency room,” said Joel Bergenfeld, chief executive of the hospital. “This was an immediate community need.”

Even so, the hospital is in a relatively affluent area, where hospitals are not as likely to be overburdened with high numbers of uninsured and underinsured patients.

“If I could have opened up an emergency room, it would have been in Inglewood or in the South-Central Los Angeles area,” Meyer said.For the first few weeks, the emergency room will take walk-in patients only; when the process is smoothed out, it will begin to accept ambulances, Rosen said.

The hospital also opened up its diagnostic and imaging center Wednesday. It includes several magnetic resonance imaging and digital X-ray machines.