John Welling, MD
Co-Founder | CEO
Dr. John Welling is Co-founder and CEO of ClearChoice Cataract Counselor. He is also a board-certified, fellowship-trained cornea, cataract, and refractive surgeon and Director of Refractive Surgery at Medical Eye Center in Medford, Oregon.
Dr. Welling serves on the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery (ASCRS) Surgical Skills Transfer Committee, has served as a Lead Instructor for ASCRS cataract surgery courses and taught cataract surgery courses at the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Following his cornea, cataract, and refractive surgery fellowship at Emory University, Dr. Welling and his family spent a year in Africa and Asia, where he served as the Cure Blindness Project/Moran Eye Center International Fellow. He subsequently spent four years as Country Medical Coordinator for the Cure Blindness Project in Ghana, West Africa.
In 2020, Dr. Welling co-founded Daybreak Vision Project (opens in a new tab) , a nonprofit dedicated to bringing sight-restoring cataract surgery to those in greatest need. Daybreak provides intensive hands-on training for local surgeons and nurses in Sub-Saharan Africa and partners with them to execute high-volume cataract outreach programs. Since its inception, Daybreak has provided more than 15,000 sight-restoring cataract surgeries and trained more than 100 surgeons and 350 nurses.
Over more than a decade as a cataract and refractive surgeon, Dr. Welling recognized an opportunity to fundamentally improve how patients are educated about cataract surgery. He saw that patients were being asked to make life-changing decisions about their vision in a single office visit, with limited time and resources to educate themselves about the many lens implant options available. It became clear that patients needed more time: Time to learn, time to explore, time to ask questions, and time to consider their options. And surgeons needed a better way to educate.
Dr. Welling and partners co-founded ClearChoice Cataract Counselor in 2025. ClearChoice is a patient-forward, pre-appointment patient education experience - thorough, balanced, peer-reviewed, and personalized. Patients learn about cataract surgery and their lens implant options in the comfort of home, learning at their own pace. The result is a more meaningful conversation between patient and surgeon—and a more informed decision about one of the most important choices a patient will ever make about their vision.
ClearChoice also adds tremendous value for surgeons, helping them build trust, maximize efficiency, grow advanced technology lens implant revenue, and optimize patient satisfaction.
For Dr. Welling and his team, ClearChoice's mission extends beyond cataract surgery education. Worldwide, 94 million people are blind or visually impaired by cataracts; ninety percent of these live in low or middle-income countries. That is why for every subscribing surgeon, ClearChoice funds one sight-restoring cataract surgery each month through its partnership with Daybreak Vision Project (opens in a new tab) . In this way, every ClearChoice surgeon becomes a partner in this joyful, life-changing work.
Dr. Welling is grateful for the opportunity to combine his passions for cataract surgery, patient education, technologic innovation, and global blindness prevention. He lives in Southern Oregon with his wife and five children and enjoys backpacking, kayaking, fishing, and exploring the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.