CARTI held a groundbreaking Friday for its new cancer center at 4201 Springhill Drive in North Little Rock.
The nonprofit's new $7 million center is planned to open in February 2020. Polk Stanley Wilcox is the architect; Manoj Patel of SETU Inc. is the owner and developer. He is building the facility and leasing it to CARTI.
The two-story, 24,000-SF facility will offer comprehensive cancer treatment services. It will include the following features:
- Fully integrated cancer care services for medical and radiation oncology, as well as diagnostic imaging
- An expansive and sunlit infusion area
- Heated infusion chairs
- Varian Linear accelerator
- PET/CT
- Low Dose CT scanner
Ocologists Kewen Jauss, Omer Khalil, Lawrence Mendelsohn, Kamal Patel, Christopher Ross and Diane Wilder will see patients in the new building. CARTI currently staffs an office adjacent to Baptist Health Medical Center-North Little Rock, located across Springhill Drive.
CARTI President and CEO Adam Head called cancer a “villain” that attacks nearly 17,000 Arkansans each year and takes the lives of nearly 7,000 Arkansans each year. The state has one of the highest death rates in the nation, he said.
“There may be many who say we’ve got the best tools and we’ve got to be the best team [to treat cancer], but we want to do more at CARTI, and we want to do it by physically going to where are patients and their families are fighting cancer. We believe in meeting cancer at your doorstep, your hometown and in this community,” Head said.
He also told the crowd of at least 60 that he grew up in the Lakewood neighborhood of North Little Rock and, because of that, he is especially honored to be involved in bringing a CARTI center to the city.
During his remarks, Albert Braunfisch, chairman of CARTI’s board, praised the nonprofit’s leadership that will “ensure CARTI becomes the cancer treatment destination in Arkansas and in this region.”
North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith called this project an “exclamation point” on the city’s growing medical corridor.
John Owens, North Little Rock Chamber president and CEO, also spoke. He said, “It’s a project that’s going to create jobs and economic development, but it’s also going to provide quality of life. Medical community, having a strong medical community, is a really great economic development tool that helps us attract new businesses to our community.”
(Correction: A previous verson of this article incorrectly stated that Flake and Kelley Commercial would manage the property. We have corrected the error.)
