After years of helping under-served Hispanic residents of central Massachusetts with eye care, Dr. Gisela Velez has been honored by the Small Business Association. Her clinic, Central Mass Retina and Uveitis Center, was recently named Woman-Owned Business of the Year.
Velez says her ability to care for patients while also speaking both English and Spanish has helped her better serve her patients. Her practice provides specialized medical ophthalmic care to patients whose only other option would be to travel to Boston for treatment and surgery for cataracts, glaucoma, uveitis and various retinal conditions.
After her residency, Velez said, she took a part-time job at an office in Worcester and then became determined to focus on operating clinics in central Massachusetts. She opened her first in 2012.
“I was building a patient base that was very heavily Spanish-speaking,” she told the Sampan. “There is a very large Dominican community, a very large Puerto Rican community, and a very large Central and South American community. Me, being a native Puerto Rican, it was very striking … so I decided I really wanted to stay in that area and continue providing care to these patients.”
Velez has two offices, one in Ayer and one in Marlborough, and has plans for a third in Worcester.
She said she likes that she can help her patients by speaking with them in Spanish and identifying culturally with them.
“Being able to communicate at that level with the patient made adherence to regimens much better,” she said. “When I decided to open my own practice I decided I wanted to stay here and serve this community.”
Velez said she believes that working with patients means more than crossing language barriers, but cultural barriers, too.
“The cultural barriers are often more important than then language ones. … To narrow that gap, you need people who belong to those communities to provide care to those communities.”
But the path to operating her own practices was not easy.
“When you are in private practice and you have your own small business, providing care in those communities is not only expensive, as these are often high-risk patients, but these are also patients that are often insured in ways that do not give you the same financial compensation as other insurance plans… . In a field like ophthalmology where the technology is expensive, it is not uncommon to spend more than half a million dollars on that equipment, so that you can provide good care.”
She said the costs for doctors like her gives little incentive to stay in communities where people need the most help.
“We have a system that is set up that discourages members of these communities who successfully complete their training from going back to those communities to provide care. So that’s what I think needs to be fixed.”
Velez said running a woman-owned business also has challenges.
“You don’t have an ‘old boy’s network.’ As a woman in my field, there is no real network you can tap into. There just aren’t enough of us out there that are business owners in ophthalmology. Whether we like it or not, for better or for worse, as a woman, as a wife, as a mother, I had a lot of other responsibilities to juggle. You have to find a way to balance. There is no set algorithm that tells you how to do it. You’re going to hear from a lot of people, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do this or that’ – but to be successful and to be able to balance your life and your business requires creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. You have to do things in ways that buck the system. … My advice is to never forget what’s important to you and why you are doing what you are doing.”