Doctor Defeats Red Tape Jungle in Bid to Save Woman : Medicine: An Irvine Medical Center physician succeeded in getting a Medi-Cal ID number for a patient in desperate need of a liver transplant.

Rayola Petersen’s life hung in the balance. Comatose and suffering from multiple organ failure when she was admitted to Irvine Medical Center, doctors said that she needed a liver transplant to survive.

But Petersen, 57, had no private health insurance, and though she was covered for a variety of illnesses under the county’s Indigent Medical Services plan, that program does not pay for liver transplants.

It was then that Dr. Jahangir Ahdout, an internist at Irvine Medical Center, intervened on her behalf.

“Without the liver, she was dead,” he said Monday. “She wouldn’t have had any chance of survival.”

Thanks mainly to his efforts and persistence, medical center officials say, the story has a happy ending. After three days of telephoning physicians, hospitals and state health insurance officials around the state pleading his patient’s case, Ahdout obtained a Medi-Cal identification number for Petersen, enabling her to qualify for state health insurance and consequently gain admittance to Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco.

Petersen is now awaiting surgery at one of the few facilities in the state with an open bed for a liver-transplant patient.

“For all of this to happen in three days is amazing with all of the bureaucratic stuff they had to go through,” said Stacey Griffin, a medical center public relations spokesperson. “There was a 99% chance she would die the next day when she was first brought into Irvine.”

When Petersen was admitted to the hospital Oct. 1, she was eligible for Medi-Cal, a state insurance plan that serves the poor and elderly. But the process of obtaining an identification number can take several months through normal channels. In the meantime, her doctor feared, Petersen could die.

Ahdout personally telephoned physicians, hospitals and state health insurance officials, pleading the urgency of the case.

“They (hospitals) said, ‘There is no way we’re going to take this patient without a medical (ID) number,’ ” Ahdout said. “I was spending 10 to 15 hours a day on this patient, nights and days. I was coming home and getting on the phone to different medical offices and physicians to make them accept the patient.”

Finally, at 4 p.m. Thursday, Petersen received her Medi-Cal identification number and within 20 minutes was on her way to San Francisco.