CARTI exec provides details on ‘full-fledged cancer center’ coming to El Dorado

This rendering shows what the new CARTI Cancer Center in El Dorado will look like upon completion. The facility will be located in what was formerly Office Depot at 1601 N. West Ave., and renovations of the building are expected to be completed in late summer in 2021. (Contributed)
This rendering shows what the new CARTI Cancer Center in El Dorado will look like upon completion. The facility will be located in what was formerly Office Depot at 1601 N. West Ave., and renovations of the building are expected to be completed in late summer in 2021. (Contributed)

The El Dorado Rotary Club met Monday over Zoom, and Daric Washington, assistant vice president for the CARTI southern region, gave an update on the organization’s local cancer center expected to open this summer.

“We’re coming to El Dorado — which, we’re already there — but we’re coming to El Dorado in a bigger fashion,” Washington said.

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Daric Washington

El Dorado currently hosts a treatment facility at 528 W. Faulkner, where Dr. Balagopalan Nair, an oncologist and hematologist, works with between 60 and 120 patients every week. Nair works out of the office on Tuesdays and every other Friday. APRN Kayla Williams also staffs the facility, which, according to CARTI’s website, provides medical oncology.

“Right now, this is what I call like a storefront area we’re at. He’s outgrown it. We had been looking at different places in El Dorado that would give our patients a little more space, a little more privacy, not be so crammed in, and so we located another building,” Washington said.

In December, CARTI announced that it had acquired the building that formerly housed Office Depot at 1601 N. West Ave and would be converting it into a comprehensive cancer center. Washington said the remodel of the building will be broken into two phases, which are currently still in the design phase.

The new facility will offer infusion treatment services, hematology, oncology, imaging scans, including PET (positron emitting tomography) and CT (computed tomography), and radiation therapy. A second doctor will join Nair in El Dorado in 2022, as well, Washington said.

“Our plan is to be up and running in the summer of 2021 … with Phase One,” Washington said. “Our first phase is going to consist of infusion services, hematology, oncology and also we’re going to have PET (and) CT (scanning) there. Our second phase, we’re going to add a select few other imaging services and also radiation therapy. We should have a full-fledged cancer center there at that time.”

A date hasn’t been set yet for completion of the second phase, Washington said, but in the meantime, the CARTI Cancer Center in Pine Bluff, out of which he is based, will be able to fill the gap in services for local patients.

Washington also said CARTI hopes to hire people from El Dorado and around the area at the new cancer center.

“A lot of our folks that go down to El Dorado, they travel from the Little Rock Cancer Center, and what we would like to do — CARTI believes in growing within a community, creating jobs within a community,” he said. “That is our mission and our goal is to hire from within the community. That’s the best way to grow a business and the best way to reach a community. … We definitely want to do that.”

CARTI has several other cancer centers in the region, as well as across Arkansas and throughout the country. The new treatment facility in El Dorado will take up the entirety of the 25,000 square foot building it is to be located in.

“Our mission is treating folks as close as we can get them to home, that’s truly what we believe in,” Washington said.

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