By Jessica Yannelli, OD, of Downingtown and West Chester, Pennsylvania
I’m passionate about optometry. I love what I do, and I love having the opportunity to use my skills to have a meaningful presence in my community and provide a needed service. My unofficial slogan is that I’m putting the care back in eye care. With the teams in my two offices, we embrace the patients in the chair. I’m not interested in processing people through my office. I want to take care of them, and I want it to come across that way.
After all, that’s how I felt as a young, nearsighted child, who had great experiences with visits to my optometrist. I loved how I could see and feel better. During my annual exam with my OD while I was in college, I told him I was considering a career in medicine. He asked me if I had considered optometry, and he explained that he had an amazing career and loved it. With thorough research and shadowing, I found it was the right path for me, too. Years later, I saw him at an optometry school alumni event and let him know I took his advice.
I worked for others for several years in private practice or corporate offices, filling in and also full-time positions, but ownership was always my goal. When my husband and I moved back to our hometown, I decided to break out on my own so I could provide my own genuine patient care experience. I’m building my two locations for Precision Eye Care on a foundation of primary care, and we’re engaging the community and appealing to whole families—kids, parents and grandparents. There’s always an interesting case from examining a young child to a post-op cataract visit or taking a foreign body out of someone’s eye to fitting a teen with his or her first contact lenses. As my base grows, I look forward to providing even more services that I enjoy such as specialty gas perm and scleral contact lens fits.
Dr. Yannelli spoke with WO about the opportunity to open her second practice. Click here to read the story.
