40 Under Forty 2020: Karen Puca-Pinho
Photo | Matthew Wright
Karen Puca-Pinho
- Title: Patient services supervisor
- Company: Family Health Center of Worcester
- Residence: Marlborough
- Birthplace: Brazil
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Even before a pandemic, the Family Health Center was an agency with its hands full: Helping a patient population less likely to have health insurance and at greater risk of homelessness or addiction. That’s a sizable group of patients, more than 29,000 Greater Worcester residents and one out of every eight residents in the city.
The Family Health Center then had to quickly adjust to providing another service – coronavirus tests and care – and Karen Puca-Pinho has been central to the pandemic and other efforts. She oversees a multilingual staff of 39 and is responsible for the center’s operations, patient registration and patient scheduling. Puca-Pinho proved herself at the center, where she was hired in 2011 as a Portuguese medical interpreter. She improved those operations by figuring something out: Medical interpreters could better support low-income immigrants, refugees and older adults who are less proficient in English if they were trained to beyond simple interpreting and instead helped improve access to care through patient navigation and insurance enrollment assistance. Now far more patients are getting that help. Calls for patient translation have risen nearly 50% since she began managing those operations in 2018.
Who would play you in the movie about your life? Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman
What was your hardest achievement? I tackle every project with a positive attitude and open mind, as it is an opportunity for improvement.
Whose career do you want to emulate? My father, who was a director of a community hospital and a psychiatric director in 1970's-1990's. He fought for equality, as he believed no patients should be counted as numbers but given respect and kindness. Unfortunately, our world did not have the opportunity to see his talents as he is now resting in peace.
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