KAISER TRIMS URGENT CARE PROGRAM AIMS FOR MORE TIME WITH PERSONAL PHYSICIANS.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

Kaiser Permanente has closed its daytime adult urgent care center in Woodland Hills and redeployed its staff in order to give patients a better shot at actually seeing their assigned doctors.

If the pilot program works, it may be expanded to surrounding Kaiser hospitals.

The move keys into a growing trend in health care, where hospitals shift physicians from urgent care back into primary practice with open spots each day to handle the most ill patients. Advocates say it allows patients to see their regular doctor instead of a revolving on-duty staff, ensuring better continuity in treatment.

The health plan began notifying members over the weekend that it will test the redeployment at its Woodland Hills location to see if the 82 doctors can provide better care by holding longer regular office hours. With more open slots to see new patients each day, Dr. William Penman, who's overseeing the project, said the sick will be better served.

``You get appointments instead of urgent care, where you'd wait 10 minutes or two hours if it was busy,'' Penman, Kaiser's assistant area medical director, said. ``You can see the person who you've bonded with and that continuity of care helps the patient a lot. If you saw someone who wasn't your doctor, they'd address the problem, not get into the nuts and bolts.''

The after-hours urgent care will continue weekdays from 5 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. and on weekends and holidays from 8 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.

``The upside would be potentially that if you've got an urgent problem during normal business hours, you're going to get in and see your primary care doctor, who'll be more familiar with you,'' said Jeffrey McCombs, a health economist and associate professor at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy. ``The downside would be that if you're going to put aside five visits for urgent care, they have to get used. If you can't match them up, you're going to be wasting resources.''

Penman said the hospital will keep some doctors on hand solely for pure walk-ins and that others will be able to take their colleagues' cases if a patient has to be seen and isn't picky about who receives them. Though still a relatively new phenomenon, Kristine Yahn, a registered nurse who serves as executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Californians for Patient Care, said it could one day become the norm.

``One of the problems we've seen in the last decade is that physicians get booked up too quickly so people can't see them,'' Yahn said. ``More and more primary care physicians are moving in that direction. If Kaiser's moving in that direction, other folks will head that way, too.''

Brent Hopkins, [phone]

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com