PC Pediatricians

Given the shortage of pediatric care in many poor and working-class Los Angeles neighborhoods, county health officials have come up with a high-tech solution: doctors on camera.

And last week, they made their latest foray into video- and computer-assisted medicine when they opened the Mary Henry Telemedicine Center at Vermont Avenue and 109th Street.

“It’s reinvented the house call,” said Dr. Charles Flowers, an eye surgeon and director of the county’s telemedicine program. “Instead of taking the bus, patients can walk down the block to the clinic. Instead of a patient coming to me, I can come to the patient” through technology.

Parents who take their children to the new clinic will be met by a physician’s assistant or a resident medical student, who will conduct the initial examination. Those who need immediate care will be taken by shuttle to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, Flowers said.

If the advice of a specialist is required, the assistant will query a doctor standing by in another part of town via a video camera hooked up to a computer. The arrangement will allow the specialist to view injuries through the camera.

The new clinic--open initially on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays--is intended to help people like Susan Morales, who knows about being a single mother on welfare without medical insurance.

When one of her daughters got sick, it meant getting up at 5 a.m., taking the bus to a clinic, waiting until it opened at 10 a.m. and waiting even longer for a doctor.

Morales, 43, still regrets the time she didn’t force her eldest daughter to see a doctor when her eyes were weeping with infection.

“She didn’t want to go stand in line,” said Morales. Later, she had to rush her daughter to the emergency room because her eyes sealed shut. It was too late--they were permanently damaged, said Morales, who will work as a medical receptionist at the new clinic.

About 18% of the children across the state are uninsured, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. The highest percentage in Los Angeles County is in South-Central Los Angeles, at 32%. Health care problems have been compounded since the 1990s, when two-thirds of the county’s medical clinics were closed.

Flowers, who is leading the telemedicine charge, said it’s vital to get help to patients quickly. An assistant professor of ophthalmalogy at Drew Medical, Flowers said he started years ago to look for a way to link technology and medical care in the inner city after he noticed that 40% of his patients in South-Central had preventable blindness.

In the early 1990s, the federal government gave grants to start telemedicine clinics in rural communities. Flowers figured the clinics would work just as well in urban areas, so he applied for grants.

He got enough money to open an ophthalmology telemedicine center in Long Beach in 1996. It is in a community center at the Carmelitas Housing Development.

Two years later, he opened a second ophthalmology center in East Los Angeles. The data collected from these sites are being used to study the health trends of minority groups.

After studying the South-Central area, Flowers decided a pediatric center was the next logical move.

The program has received half a dozen grants, including $800,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and $500,000 from the nonprofit California Telehealth and Telemedicine Center in Sacramento. The county has spent $1.6 million on its telemedicine program since 1996, Flowers said.

A Brentwood doctor even donated his home--and paid for moving the house to the Vermont Street location.

Local parents are already excited about the new pediatric center, which is next to a child-care center and around the corner from an elementary school. One of them is Terese Murphy, whose eyes lit up when she was told a clinic was opening up near her 3-year-old’s school.

Not too long ago, Murphy said, she waited eight hours at a hospital after the child struck her chin on a coffee table.

“They didn’t even give me a rag,” Murphy said, shaking her head and lifting her daughter’s chin to show a puckered scar. “I was complaining all night.”

If the clinic had been open, the wait would have been half an hour, Flowers said. The doctor’s assistant would have been able to take a picture of the injury, send it to the doctor and stich the wound if necessary.

The most common matters doctors expect to deal with at the center are asthma, screening for lead poisoning and nutritional deficiencies.

Xylina Bean, with the Department of Pediatrics at King/Drew Medical Center, said she also hopes to offer immunizations. About 70% of the area’s children aren’t immunized by time they are 2 years old, she said.

The new clinic is named for Mary Henry, a three-term member of the Compton school board and a children’s advocate.