Fady Boules, PMHNP-BC

In 1992, in a modest clinic in Southern California, a psychiatrist named Dr. Syam Kunam opened his doors with a conviction that would carry further than any business plan: that people living with mental illness deserve the same dignity, rigor, and constancy as patients anywhere else in medicine. There was no network behind him. No infrastructure. No safety net. One clinic. One psychiatrist. One dream.

The early years asked everything of that conviction. Psychiatry was still fighting for its rightful place in mainstream healthcare, and the communities the clinic served — working families, people who had waited months to be seen, patients other systems had quietly given up on — had long been asked to accept less. Dr. Kunam refused to accept less on their behalf. Appointments were kept. Calls were returned. Patients were known by name. “Patient first” was not a slogan on a wall; it was simply how the clinic ran when no one was watching.

Word traveled the way it always does in communities that have been underserved: quietly at first, and then all at once. One clinic became two. Two became five. Each new location opened not because growth was the goal, but because somewhere nearby, people were waiting too long for care — and in psychiatry, waiting carries a cost no family should have to bear.

Today, Inland Psychiatric Medical Group brings together psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, psychologists, and licensed therapists, serving communities across California. Its provider directory and location directory show the people and places behind that network.

But what does patient first mean at this scale? It means access — a relentless focus on being reachable when people finally decide to reach out. It means continuity — care that does not reset every time life changes. It means meeting patients where they already are: in clinic, through telehealth, and increasingly within the trusted primary care settings of their own communities. And it means that a patient in the smallest clinic receives the same standard of care as one in the busiest office in the network.

More than three decades later, every provider who joins IPMG inherits the founding promise — that no patient will be turned away, talked down to, or lost in the system. It is why the organization has endured while so much in healthcare has changed around it, and why its future is being written the same way its history was: one patient at a time.

One clinic. One psychiatrist. One dream — now carried by a team serving communities across California, under a single mission that has never changed: patient first.

That is the organization I am proud to serve — as a clinician, and as its Vice President of Business Development. When you sit down with me, you are never sitting down with just one provider. More than three decades of patient-first psychiatry stand behind every appointment I keep.