Photo from Saiyora Rahimova’s personal archive
A patient visits an ophthalmologist with a vision complaint. From there: lens fitting, order processing, service questions. These used to be separate stops on the journey — the clinic in one place, the optical store in another, the service center somewhere else.
Today, major optical retail chains bring all of these processes under one roof, employing physicians who are responsible for both the medical side and the quality of business processes.
Saiyora Rahimova, a senior ophthalmologist at the federal retail chain Linzmaster, holds exactly this kind of role. She sees adult and pediatric patients, handles complaint resolution, and oversees the B2B partnership track with eye clinics.
From Dushanbe to Moscow: A Change of Professional Environment
Rahimova began her career in Dushanbe, at a clinic run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tajikistan, where she practiced as an ophthalmologist. She later relocated permanently to Russia and continued her practice in Moscow and the Moscow region.
She describes her move from clinical medicine to the optical retail industry as an unfamiliar starting point.
Clinical practice and optical retail business operate by different rules, and in the early stages she had to rebuild her working processes for a new environment: a different pace, different reporting formats, a different circle of people whose approval of every daily decision required.
Rahimova is 34 years old today, and her position at Linzmaster combines both sides of that transition: the clinical and the managerial.
From the Exam Room to the Negotiating Table — A Single Working Day
The core of her work is seeing patients, both adults and children. At the same time, she handles complaint cases: disputes over the quality of optical services require both medical and managerial judgment.
This combination keeps two different types of decisions in focus at once: medical ones, based on diagnosis and evidence, and business ones, where deadlines, internal procedures, and client satisfaction matter.
A separate area of Rahimova’s responsibility is the B2B track: building working relationships with the eye clinics the network partners with. In effect, it comes down to constantly balancing two agendas, so that neither one suffers at the expense of the other.
Nine Months in a Closed Professional Community
One project Rahimova is proud of is her work with the Expert Medical Committee.
For nine months, she was responsible for communications and tasked with building a strong professional community through a Telegram channel. The channel remains closed and intended for colleagues, and Rahimova continues to run it herself.
The doctor also took part in creating the corporate magazine Beyond Vision, which covered the work of the optical network in Russia; the publication reached readers in 150 countries around the world.
For an internal corporate project, that kind of reach is a rare result, and it indirectly confirms that the network’s practice is of interest beyond the local market.
Rahimova also highlights her project with the Medsi clinic: she led the joint B2B initiative and calls the experience one of the most significant of her career.
Her roles over the past several years can be summed up in three areas:
- coordinating communications within a closed medical community;
- helping launch the corporate publication Beyond Vision;
- leading the joint B2B project with the Medsi clinic.
Two Studies in One Year
In 2024, Rahimova authored two scientific publications. One addresses contemporary strategies for controlling myopia progression in children, examining the use of atropine, orthokeratology, and combined approaches.
The topic turned out to be a direct extension of her daily practice: many of Rahimova’s patients are children, and myopia progression control is a question she is regularly asked about.
The second paper, on neurodegenerative mechanisms in the pathogenesis of ophthalmological diseases, was published on the website of the Aeterna scientific publishing center.
How Rahimova Trains Fellow Ophthalmologists
Today, the doctor is an active member of the Moscow Association of Ophthalmologists and Strabismologists.
She also trains colleagues in pediatric ophthalmology: several specialists have completed a three-day internship under her supervision, working through the same clinical cases she encounters daily, both in her own practice and while reviewing other physicians’ cases.
She sums up her professional principle simply: grow and develop in the specialty every day, relying on evidence.
Partnership with Essilorluxottica
The company Rahimova works for is part of a European holding and partners with Essilorluxottica, one of the largest players in the global optical industry.
Operating within a structure of that scale sets uniform requirements for service and quality, regardless of which country a given location operates in.
For Rahimova, this is more than a corporate fact: she sees her mission as improving the lives of her young patients through the right choice of vision correction, helping them see the world as it truly is.
She combines all of this with studying English in her free time — a practical step for anyone who expects to take part in professional conversations on the international stage.
In the coming years, she plans to attend international conferences in her field — a logical continuation of the path she has already built, from clinical practice in Dushanbe to work at the intersection of medicine and business at a federal Russian retail chain.
A Model With No Ready-Made Template
Patient care and partnership agreements with clinics rarely fall under the responsibility of one person, let alone alongside research work and the other tasks a single specialist covers.
Rahimova acknowledges that there is no ready-made template for a role like hers, and that she works out decisions as she goes, based on the details of each specific situation.
A patient at an appointment and a partner in a B2B project ultimately want similar things: a clear explanation and a result that can be verified. Perhaps that intersection is exactly where her entire professional model holds together.
