OPTIMA Draws 50 Offers by Deadline : Health: Planners hope managed-care networks will start treating Medi-Cal recipients in July.

Enough doctors and hospitals have applied to join the county’s new health-care system to provide the poor with sufficient locations for care, a spokesman for the system said Thursday.

The organization revamping Orange County’s Medi-Cal system received 50 proposals by the March 1 deadline from health-care providers wanting to join, said Mary Dewane, chief executive officer of OPTIMA, a unique system that will bring the county’s 300,000 Medi-Cal recipients into managed-care networks beginning in July.

“Most major health-care providers are represented, and we have a strong showing of (health maintenance organizations),” Dewane said. “We have one of the strongest responses anywhere in California.”

“I’m very pleased with the number. It’s a strong response,” Dewane said. The turnout, however, represents a drop in the number of organizations that initially expressed interest in joining the program in January. At that time, 90 health-care organizations submitted “letters of intent” to participate.

OPTIMA officials said the discrepancy doesn’t mean there was a loss of enthusiasm for the program.

“It’s hard to tell initially,” said Mike Stockstill, an OPTIMA spokesman. “But we think a lot of people who applied early on joined with another group.”

In all, the 50 respondents, which included 10 HMOs and 37 “physician hospital consortia,” will encompass hundreds of hospital beds and thousands of individual physicians, Optima officials said. That should provide the county’s poor with enough locations to meet their health-care needs, Dewane said.

Over the next two weeks, OPTIMA will evaluate the 50 proposals and hopes to award contracts by April 13, Dewane said.

State officials are watching OPTIMA, an experimental approach to Medi-Cal designed to cut public costs and provide better medical access to the poor.

The program already has changed the health-care landscape in Orange County, medical officials say. Dewane said many physicians who are longtime Medi-Cal providers have formed networks with other physicians and hospitals just to qualify for participation in OPTIMA.