Alternate Solutions HomeCare
What: Home health care company
Where: Main office at 1251 E. Dorothy Lane, Kettering
Phone: (937) 298-1111
President and co-founder: Tessie Ganzsarto
Website: www.ashomecare.com
Employees: approximately 600
The deal between Alternate Solutions HomeCare and hospital group Kettering Health Network to form a new Dayton area home care business is a new thing locally. But Alternate Solutions has been making deals like this for several years now in other parts of the state.
The new company, yet unnamed, merges Kettering Health’s Home Care and In-Home Care business with Alternate’s Dayton area operations. The Dayton Daily News first reported the joint venture Jan. 25.
Kettering-based Alternate Solutions has nine total partnerships with other health care providers, said Tessie Ganzsarto, Alternate co-founder and president. Of those, six are hospital systems in Ohio and one in West Virgina, such as Genesis HealthCare System in Zanesville, Ohio. Alternate Solutions manages their partners’ home care business or acts as their preferred home care provider.
Doing more partnerships like these is the future growth strategy for Alternate Solutions, Ganzsarto said.
“We really look to only partner, we’re not going to do startups. We think we bring a lot of value to the table and quite honestly a benefit to the hospital that really just needs that expertise in doing what we do everyday. So we just see it as a huge opportunity for us and other systems,” Ganzsarto said.
The reason health systems are looking to partner is to prepare for health care reform, which changes the way health care systems are paid, she said. By working with an affiliated partner, it helps hospitals and nursing homes control costs and keep from losing the patient referral back to the hospital or nursing home.
“You’re going to see hospitals really focusing on their post-acute space. It’s going to be such a big part of how care is delivered … because you’re going to have to find the highest quality at the lowest cost setting,” Ganzsarto said. “They’ve got to try figure out how they can still sustain a very costly form of care being in the hospital and how they can rely on their home care agency to help them manage the care of that patient more appropriately.”
Alternate Solutions partnered in 2006 with Carespring Health Care Management, which operates nursing homes and assisted care facilities. Carespring, based in Loveland in Clermont County, has 10 locations in the Cincinnati, Dayton and Northern Kentucky area.
Carespring wants its patients to get better, and if they leave the nursing home, to stay better. Otherwise, customer patients or customer hospitals might not choose Carespring again in the future, said Kimberly Majick, executive vice president of marketing and admissions.
“Our reasoning for that is we just wanted our patient outcomes to continue to be what they were,” Majick said. “If patients get poor outcomes, it’s not likely they’ll continue to choose us as a provider.”
The home care and nursing home businesses are largely based on referrals. Hospital and nursing home patients still have a choice of which home care agency to go to.
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