Eye surgeon, professor honored with teaching award

Going to the eye doctor can be intimidating. But Dr. Giulio Diamante hopes that when patients enter OPTX Rhode Island, his ophthalmology practice and eyeglass store in Johnston, the sight of familiar faces and a soothing reception area will ease any anxiety they might be feeling.

“We try to make it very welcoming,” Diamante said. He credits Lynne Diamante, his wife and OPTX CEO, with guiding the effort to make the facility’s main entrance as hospitable as possible. Patients checking in for an appointment are greeted with a sleek, modern waiting room and an elegantly arranged selection of designer frames.

In addition to conducting eye exams and selling eyeglasses, Diamante’s practice offers eye surgery through its SurgiHealth Rhode Island center located in the same building. Patients can also receive fittings for contact lenses. Running a practice with that many services might sound like a big undertaking. But Diamante doesn’t see it that way. “To me,” he said in an interview last Friday, “this is not work.”

In addition to running his private practice, Diamante is a clinical assistant professor at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. In this role, he oversees medical residents providing care at Rhode Island Hospital. In addition to guiding them as they perform scheduled surgeries, Diamante also walks medical residents through emergency room treatment for trauma patients. On June 6, he was awarded the Robert E. Curran MD Teaching Excellence Award by the Warren Alpert Medical School for his work as an educator.

The award is named after the late Robert E. Curran, a former ophthalmology professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School who died in 2017. Diamante, who recalls working with him, said that “Dr. Curran was a staple of our ophthalmologist community.”

“I was obviously honored to receive an award in his name,” Diamante said, describing Curran as an “old-school doctor that really cared about his patients.”

Diamante said that he’s very proud of the residents that he works with, describing them as knowledgeable and “just fun to be around.” He added that helping them complete their medical training reminds him of his own time as a medical student. “It’s a good way to give back to the community,” he said.

OPTX RI provides a variety of procedures in addition to eye exams, including cataract removal and laser eye surgery through SurgiHealth. Diamante estimates that the practice handles roughly 30,000 active patients. “I could not do this without our team,” he said. Using state-of-the-art technology, Diamante said, doctors at the practice can pick up diseases at the micron level and work to address them early on.

Despite the modern equipment and interior design, Diamante said the ethos at OPTX RI remains the same as ever: “All of us devote our careers to our patients.”

While he lives in Cranston, Diamante said that becoming familiar with the Johnston community has been one of the highlights of his career. Whether he’s meeting patients in the operating room or running into them at the Market Basket across the street, he said that treating them with respect and kindness was his top priority.

“I never come out the same person” is how he described his work. “You learn from every patient.”