Doctors Seek to Plug Gaps in Care for Poor : Health: Latino physicians and hospital fill need with first of eight clinics for low-income people who often seek basic aid at emergency rooms, hole-in-the-wall clinics.

Maria Aurora has spent countless hours in emergency rooms, waiting for treatment for chronic diabetes and struggling to communicate with doctors who don’t speak Spanish.

Last week, 65-year-old Aurora sat instead at the Alto Care Medical Group, a new, no-frills clinic in Orange that is close to her home and is the first of eight comprehensive-care centers in the county planned by a coalition of 30 Latino doctors.

The network of physicians is affiliated with St. Joseph Hospital and is large enough to compete for managed-care contracts--a must to survive in the age of health reform. The doctors say they are intent on bringing bilingual, culturally sensitive care with expanded hours to the county’s low-income Latinos, often alienated by the medical system or victimized at hole-in-the-wall clinics.

“I wanted to give back to the community. That is one of the main things that this is about,” said Antonio Alarcon, a urologist who practices in Santa Ana and Monterey Park and is a founding member of the coalition.

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The group’s goal is to provide a wide range of services, including urgent care, X-rays, laboratory and pharmacy services, referrals to specialists within the network and hospital care by the same doctors. The Orange clinic recently expanded hours and is open most weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. and is planning to expand weekend hours.

“This will be a very important service,” Aurora said, as she sat flipping a magazine in the waiting room on a recent afternoon. “Sometimes people just can’t make it earlier in the day because they work. Then you end up in an emergency room, and sometimes they won’t even see you. Last time, I waited and waited until I finally left.”

The network, incorporated as the California Hispanic Medical Group, recently began advertising in Spanish-language newspapers and is poised to sign a deal on a 300,000-square-foot building in Santa Ana that will serve as their second medical facility and administrative hub, said Dr. Fernando Montelongo, a founding member.

There are plans for two clinics for Santa Ana and one each in Anaheim, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley and South County. Montelongo said he hoped the first Santa Ana clinic would open by next summer. The sites of the other six clinics are still undetermined.

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Montelongo recently closed his own offices to launch the Orange clinic on La Veta Avenue, and he said other doctors on the group’s roster will gradually phase out their practices and move into the new clinics.

All the members were trained and completed their residencies in the United States and are on staff at local hospitals. Montelongo said 90% are board certified.

“We are about raising the level of care in the community, and at the same time putting something back,” Montelongo said recently at the Orange clinic.

“Our mission is also to get involved in scholarships, voter registration and scholastic achievement.”

To that end, the doctors recently donated time and money to the “KinderCaminata,” a walkathon for kindergarten students organized by Los Amigos of Orange County and held at Rancho Santiago College to present inspirational role models to youngsters.

“We have nothing but the utmost respect for them,” said Amin David, chairman of Los Amigos, a coalition that works to raise awareness about issues affecting the Latino community.

“Not only did they come through with some bucks that we needed, they were there in a booth and they put on their best doctors’ uniforms. The little kids could see, ‘Hey, there they are. You can aspire to be a doctor.’ ”

Msgr. Jaime Soto, the vicar for the Diocese of Orange’s Latino community, attended the Orange clinic’s opening ceremony in June, along with a host of Latino business leaders, and praised the doctors’ efforts to unite.

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“Latinos have always had an instinct that for our own health and well-being it’s better to come together than to be apart. Whenever someone is sick, family comes together, and people come over,” he said. “The fact that the doctors in the medical community would come together with that same instinct is a hopeful sign for me.”

While hospitals across Southern California are looking for ways to tap into the Latino market by teaming up with community clinics, Montelongo said his group has the commitment to accomplish its vision because most members have been serving Latino patients in Orange County for years.

The group first approached St. Joseph Hospital last November, and the scope of their vision impressed hospital administrators.

“They’re very committed, they have a lot of energy, and they have some pretty broad goals. It’s not just medicine--they are really trying to hit some of the social areas too,” said Lisa Hudson, director of business development for the hospital. “I think it’s pretty ambitious to get up to 30 and 40 physicians together. We just hadn’t seen that done in the county.”

The physicians who are joining the network are “some of the core physicians who have been in the county for a very long time,” she said.

The idea for the group was born two years ago, when Robert Beltran and Roy Martinez began to ponder their predicament as doctors increasingly squeezed by burgeoning health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

The physicians, both practicing in Santa Ana at the time, were losing longtime patients as employers shepherded them into the HMOs, said Beltran, who spent 10 years practicing in Santa Ana and now has offices in Irvine and Costa Mesa.

“We wanted to be an entity with an edge,” Beltran said. “That’s where the idea came from to group together as many of the Hispanic physicians as we possibly could, with a window of opportunity existing within the Hispanic marketplace.”

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While the group is particularly poised to serve Latino patients, the doctors stressed that they are open to all, and chose a generic name--”Alto Care Medical Group”--so they would not alienate other patients.

At the Orange clinic recently, patients said a network of services with late hours would save them the high costs and long waits of emergency rooms.

When 2-year-old Joseph Gomez was seized on a recent evening with the chronic bronchitis that has plagued him since infancy, his parents rushed him to the Santa Ana clinic they know best.

But the clinic closes at 5 p.m., and the Anaheim family had no choice but to head for a nearby emergency room, said Nidia Gomez, 34, the boy’s mother.

“The schedule they have here is an excellent schedule,” Gomez said as Joseph looked through a children’s book and played with the drinking fountain in the pastel-toned waiting room.

“Many times, people get sick suddenly in the evening and there is nowhere to go but the emergency room. I can only hope that there will be more programs like this, for the whole community, Anglo as well as Latino.”