DaytonDailyNews.com

CLEARCREEK TWP., Warren County — An experiment in nursing care is taking shape just south of the Montgomery-Warren county line.

Local officials consider the area's first Avalon by Otterbein a nursing home, but the development is supposed to look and function more like upscale residential neighborhoods sprouting up around it.

"No one wants to move into a traditional nursing home," said Otterbein CEO Donald Gilmore, a veteran of the nursing home industry.

So Otterbein plans to invest more than $42 million over the next year in six such neighborhoods — clusters of five group homes, designed to bring residents "closer to their homes, closer to their families," Gilmore said.

"It's about how we perceive the people that live there," he said, seated in a conference room at the Otterbein's headquarters in Warren County, across Ohio 741 from the nonprofit's large nursing home complex.

The new Otterbein homes are the nonprofit's take on the Green House concept, developed by in Tupelo, Miss., by Bill Thomas. Green Houses have now been developed in other states including Ohio, at the Mennonite Memorial Home in Bluffton.

This approach comes from one aspect of culture change taking place throughout the nursing home industry .

In March, the Ohio Person-Centered Care Coalition held its second conference to promote practices focused on nursing home residents and designed to improve their quality of life.

While few have providers have taken the Otterbein's radical approach, the coalition's nursing homes and assisted living centers across Ohio have made changes to increase the sense of community. At Eliza Jennings, a large nursing home in Cleveland, smaller groups of residents are grouped into communities.

"You become like a surrogate family," said Elise Tareshawty, coalition chairperson and executive of the Eliza Jennings.

Otterbein developed the six homes, four to be built over the next year in Warren County, in consultation with Jude Rabig, a pioneer in the Green House movement.

Rabig advocates for and helps set up nursing homes "removing all elements of the institution and restoring people to homes," she said.

Otterbein has already opened one Avalon neighborhood in Perrysburg, and a single home in Lakeside, both in northwest Ohio. By next year, another should be under construction around Toledo.

The Clearcreek Twp. neighborhood will be the first in southern Ohio. Otterbein plans to open similar facilities near the Atrium Medical Center, the new Middletown Regional Hospital, just east of Interstate 75 this year, and two more next year in Springboro and Maineville.

Nursing aides and nurses will move between the homes, using wireless technologies to monitor residents, while walking between buildings connected by walkways and clustered around a park.

Residents can gather in their home's great room for conversation, activities or to help prepare meals.

While acknowledging the therapeutic potential for residents and employees, some experts say construction and continuing operational costs will prevent some from making the change.

"The homes that can do it. That's phenomenal," Tareshawty said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2261 or

lbudd@DaytonDailyNews.com.