HOSPITAL TO HELP CUT AUTOPSY WAITS.

Byline: CAROL ROCK Staff Writer

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors formalized an agreement Tuesday with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to provide autopsy services for the Coroner's Office.

The county has long had informal agreements with Cedars-Sinai, UCLA Medical Center and Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center to do autopsies, but this is the first formal agreement, coroner spokesman Craig Harvey said.

The agreement provides the county with autopsy services at no charge in exchange for the experience offered staff at the participating institutions.

The supervisors' 4-0 vote was one in a series of supportive moves taken by the board to assist the overwhelmed office eliminate a backlog that caused health concerns and sparked accusations of mismanagement in July. Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich was absent from the vote.

In June, the Coroner's Office was given $645,000 to hire more investigators and support staff as well as to fund three crematory contracts. In August, the board approved $32 million for a 4,000-square-foot crypt and reconfiguration of the offices of the medical examiner to accommodate the additional staff and procedures.

A formal agreement with UCLA is expected to be voted on soon, Harvey said.

``These hospitals are allowed to do only certain types of cases,'' Harvey said. ``They cannot do homicides, officer-involved deaths or in-custody deaths or plane crashes, but they can do natural deaths, traffic accidents, some trauma cases. Typically, emergency rooms are good candidates for providing these type of cases.''

The satellite facilities each handle 24 to 30 cases a year, which takes some of the stress off the coroner's year-to-date caseload of 8,400. Harvey said the numbers were ``right where they should be'' and that the department expects to handle at least 10,000 cases before the end of the year.

Satellite autopsy facilities must be teaching hospitals, allowing medical students a rotation in the coroner's office.

``The staff rotates through here (the medical examiner's main facility on Mission Road) so they understand how we do things and what we expect for the final product,'' Harvey said. ``Obviously, it takes a little bit of the burden off us as well as a little bit of stress off the family. There is less movement of the remains; bodies examined there at the hospitals can be released directly to the mortuary.''

Auxiliary programs have allowed the Coroner's Office to bring its backlog down from this year's high of 477, Harvey said.

``The count has been as low as 215 recently,'' he said. ``We're aggressively working on the issue; our goal is to get the number below 200. Sunday, the count was 263 and 112 are on the list.''

The list includes the number of bodies being autopsied or examined by investigators; the balance are those awaiting pickup by families, veterans organizations or the county for disposal. Harvey said the average time for cases to receive autopsies in their facility is two to four days, as opposed to the 10-day wait experienced in July.

``We've had a large percentage of cases in and out of here within 24 hours,'' he said. ``But it's the ones that tend to linger over four days that cause us the most grief.''

Delays are often caused by field cases, which require a larger amount of time investigators must travel to the far reaches of the county. Field cases comprise approximately 35 percent to 40 percent of the coroner's overall caseload.

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