With specialists in short supply, L.A. county turns to e-Consulting

Doctors called it the black hole. If their low-income or uninsured patients needed specialty care, they put in a referral to the massive Los Angeles County health care bureaucracy and then waited — for weeks or even months. It could take eight months to see a neurologist, more than three to see a cardiologist. To speed things up, doctors at county and community clinics urged their patients to go straight to the emergency room, the unofficial back door for specialist appointments. That way, patients could bypass the long waits and get the recommended colonoscopy or CT scan. But that route was expensive and burdensome to ERs.