OrthoArkansas of Little Rock plans to open a Spine Institute in January, on the third floor of its main office at 800 Fair Park Blvd., just off Interstate 630 in midtown Little Rock.
The $4.1 million finish-out of that floor is currently underway, and the contractor is Kinco Constructors LLC of Little Rock, according to the building permit.
Dr. James “Jimmy” Tucker, co-president and an owner, told Arkansas Business the new Spine Institute would provide comprehensive care to patients and is the practice’s first attempt at developing “an institute of excellence.”
He said it would house the spine surgeons, non-operative spine physicians and specialists already working for OrthoArkansas but in different locations. The practice has 11 locations. Three are in Little Rock, and the others are in Arkadelphia, Benton, Camden, Clinton, Conway, Heber Springs, Monticello and North Little Rock.
“So this is an attempt to bring everybody together so that there’s better collaboration,” Tucker said. “That way, if somebody needs to find care, they have one place to go where they walk in the door and everything’s available.”
He said OrthoArkansas plans to hire two more physicians and five to 10 positions overall, in subspecialities, for the new institute during the next two or three years. The practice has 26 physician-owners and employs about 350 people.
While the institute will be new, the $22.5 million 80,500-SF building that will house it is about three years old.
“When we first built the building, we didn’t need the extra space and we were not sure that we were going to build physicians’ offices there. So we left the options open for possible other businesses, but we’re busting at the seams, so we’ve got to have more office space,” Tucker said.
In addition, OrthoArkansas had to acquire more parking to meet city-mandated occupancy requirements tied to finishing out that floor, so the practice helped Saint Mark Baptist Church add parking spaces and now leases some of those spaces from the church, he said.
Back to Full Strength
Asked about the impact of COVID-19 on OrthoArkansas, Tucker said, “It was a major hit when [the state] shut down elective surgery.” That ban went into effect on April 3 and was lifted on April 27. Since then, OrthoArkansas has “returned, basically, to full strength,” he said.
That’s not to say the pandemic hasn’t had a longer-term impact. It’s “put a hold on” but not killed the practice’s plans to hire 10 to 15 doctors and open three to five urgent care clinics during the next several years.
In fact, the urgent care clinic OrthoArkansas already operates out of its main office has been “extremely important during the COVID crisis,” Tucker said. Many patients with hurt ankles or arms, broken wrists and other similar ailments used the clinic to bypass emergency rooms when “nobody knew, if you walked into an ER, if you were going to walk out infected” with the coronavirus, he said.
COVID-19 has also pushed OrthoArkansas to offer telemedicine, though that was already on its radar.
“That’s something that’s important here in Arkansas because a lot of the patients you want to see with a telemedicine visit. You know, they may have to travel. We have people that travel two to three hours to get to the office,” Tucker said. “And, if you’re just checking in with them to see how they’re doing, you’re not getting X-rays or anything, it’s a lot easier on them. Do it with a telemedicine visit versus making them drive because a two-and-a-half-hour drive to see one of us in the office turns into a five-hour trip.
“We have a lot of people who traveled from other parts of the state to come in. So the telemedicine has definitely helped with that, and we’ll continue to do it even after” the pandemic, he said.
Tucker also said OrthoArkansas is now offering outpatient, robotic-assisted total-joint surgery. Patients typically come in for an hour and go home about three hours after the surgery. The practice is one of only a “handful” in the country that offer this, Tucker said.
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