Q&A With Don Gilmore

Don Gilmore is president and CEO of Otterbein Retirement Living Communities, a not-for-profit organization that currently owns and operates six continuing care communities throughout the state of Ohio and provides management and affiliated services to two other communities. The original Otterbein community was built in Lebanon, Ohio, in 1912 for children and adults on land purchased from the Shakers. The children’s program was dropped in 1963. Otterbein Neighborhoods, a small-home model of nursing care, will open this fall. Gilmore is the third generation of his family to be involved in the senior living business. He has served as chairman of AAHSA, president of the New Jersey Association of Non-Profit Homes for the Aging, and is currently on the board of Momentum Health Solutions, a product designed specifically to allow residents in not-for-profit retirement communities to receive care at their home community.

The system that we have is fundamentally flawed and broken. The system being used to care for frail elders is a health care model designed for short-term care in a hospital setting. These institutions are not places where anyone would choose to spend the rest of their lives. We need to find a better way, one that removes some of the institutional barriers that not only plague the elders who live there but also are a plague to the people who are trying to care for them — and who care for them heroically and at a great personal emotional cost.

We’re repositioning some of our CCRCs and developing several small houses, something that we think, over time, will give benefit. The concept is as much programmatic as it is physical, although the physical side is the platform that enables the program to be significantly changed. We’re not part of the Green House Project and have clearly chosen not to be, but the small houses will be much like the original Green House model. We’re developing seven locations in Ohio — 31 small houses for 10 residents each.

We’ll operate the small homes as independent units in little communities of 50 elders each. We’re building six communities — each with five houses on a cul de sac. The single house is on a small CCRC campus that has had patio homes, apartments, and assisted living but no nursing beds. The added small house will give that facility the full continuum.

We’re taking beds from our current CCRC campuses and moving them to the new neighborhoods, which are located in zip code and market areas from which we normally draw. That means folks will move closer to where they have lived, their families live, their churches are, and their friendships and relationships remain.