Horizon Adult Health Care President and CEO Kelly Upchurch (with scissors) cuts a ribbon on Tuesday to ceremonially open the Horizon PACE center on Wilkinson Trace that provides care for seniors as an alternative to having clients placed in a nursing home.

There’s a new option for elder care in Warren County, and it doesn’t involve a residential facility.

Richmond-based Horizon Adult Health Care, which has been providing adult day health care, nursing care, physical therapy and related services for the elderly for more than two decades in rural areas of Kentucky, has opened a center in Bowling Green.

The 14,000-square-foot facility at 1110 Wilkinson Trace is called Horizon PACE (for Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly), and its goal is to provide an option other than a nursing home for seniors and their families.

“We started Horizon in 1997 with a goal of trying to keep people in their homes as long as we possibly could,” said Kelly Upchurch, Horizon president and CEO. “We can postpone the decision to go to a nursing home or eliminate that decision.”

Horizon PACE strives to do that through a program that provides adult day care, transportation, activities, meals and health care at a single facility. The company also provides social services and home care to clients age 55 and over who qualify by needing the nursing home-level of care.

It’s a business model that Upchurch says is needed simply because of changing demographics.

According to Upchurch, Kentucky has more than 500,000 residents age 65 and over with one or more disabilities and only about 27,000 nursing home beds.

“What this tells us is that there’s this wave of seniors starting to access the health care system,” Upchurch said. “We have to find different ways of doing things.”

The obvious gap between nursing home capacity and the number of seniors needing care is one that Horizon has been trying to fill.

“Horizon PACE is designed to give the support that seniors need to stay in their own homes,” Upchurch said. “We can bring them here in one of our wheelchair-accessible vans, provide breakfast and lunch and activities and then take them back to their homes.”

That template started in Albany, Upchurch’s hometown, and has spread to the point that Horizon now has 14 adult day centers in the state and is operating in 89 of Kentucky’s 120 counties.

As one of the newest, the Bowling Green Horizon PACE center is described by Upchurch as “a flagship facility” for the company.

With a staff of 25 that he expects to grow, Upchurch said the Bowling Green location includes a primary care physician, a nurse practitioner, a medical social worker, a physical therapist and staff involved in food service, transportation and coordination of activities.

Funded largely through Medicare and Medicaid, Horizon can also help coordinate visits to medical specialists outside the facility.

It’s an elder care model so appealing to physician John McGee that the Horse Cave resident came out of retirement to join the Horizon PACE staff.

“This is the way health care ought to be practiced,” McGee said. “The PACE model is an example of allocating resources toward keeping people well rather than just treating them when they’re sick.

“It saves money. Just on a resource basis, it makes sense. It’s a more efficient way of providing care.”

Upchurch believes in the model so much that he opened Horizon PACE centers in Bowling Green, Monticello and Richmond simultaneously and now has plans for centers in Somerset and London.

The Bowling Green Horizon PACE center spent November enrolling patients and preparing for a Dec. 1 launch of its services. Now Upchurch is slowly seeing the new business model take hold.

“We expect to grow a little slower in Bowling Green because we had no presence here, but we’re right on track,” he said.