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New health center for seniors opens in Wayne county

Residents of Wayne and Ontario counties eligible for nursing home care now have another option to try. ElderONE is a new center in Newark, run by Rochester Regional Health, which operates on a national model called Program for All-inclusive Care for the Elderly or PACE. There are already three such PACE centers in Rochester.

“They come into our day center - once a week, everyday - depending on their need and there they can receive all of the services that a nursing home would provide: physical therapy,   nursing, medical, rec therapy, dietary, social work,” says Dr. Stephen Ryan, medical director of ElderONE.

The new location in Newark, Ryan says, will address a particular growing need.

“Honestly there’s not a lot of primary care physician availability, particularly in the rural counties.  That’s becoming a problem across our whole region but it’s acutely a problem in the rural communities,” Ryan says.

Another issue is the lack of coordinated care. It’s one thing to get a follow up call after a visit, Ryan says, but with a center like ElderONE the idea is to coordinate all the care a patient needs in one place.

“Every frail or complexly ill individual has someone who is looking out to make sure all of their meds get filled, all of their appointments get kept. The difference is with ElderONE, the PACE model, it’s not one person, it’s 12,” Ryan says.

In order to get care at ElderONE in Newark, patients have to be residents of Wayne or Ontario counties, be 55 or older, and have Medicaid and/or Medicare. They also have to be considered nursing home eligible, according to state criteria. 

Karen Shakerdge covers health for WXXI News. She has spent the past decade asking people questions about their lives, as a documentary film producer, oral historian and now radio reporter.