Page 8 - Castle MD Spring 2020

Hometown Hero Chad Koyanagi, MD
Dr. Chad Koyanagi’s first job out of his psychiatry residency was a part-time position at Safe Haven, a shelter and treatment center in Chinatown for homeless adults with mental illnesses. He had not been exposed to “community” psychiatry at the University of Hawaii, where he attended medical school and completed his internship, residency and fellowship programs, but the six years he spent at Safe Haven struck a chord with him.
“Working with Safe Haven’s amazing
staff really sparked my interest in helping Hawaii’s most disadvantaged population,” he explained, and he was motivated to join the university’s faculty so he could help augment community psychiatry training for medical school residents through homeless outreach and other hands-on experiences.
One of the programs initiated by Dr. Koyanagi is still in place today: sending residency students to work with inmates at the Oahu Community Correctional
Center – a collaborative effort between the Department of Justice and Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety – to improve services for those serving time.
Medicine was not the only profession
Dr. Koyanagi had considered. He excelled in mathematics and was a member of McKinley High School’s math team, serving as captain in his senior year. He proudly recalls how the team was first
in the state during his last three years
of school, beating Hawaii’s top private schools. When he set off for Harvard University (the first member of his family to go away to college), he considered an engineering major, but it became apparent that biological sciences were his stronger subjects. He soon knew that his career path would lead to medicine.
With a large extended family in Hawaii, and knowing he wanted to practice medicine here, he returned home for his medical training, choosing to specialize in psychiatry where he could learn about and treat the ‘whole’ person.
Today his practice is multi-faceted or, as he likes to say, he wears three hats: At Adventist Health Castle, he serves as a psychiatric hospitalist with a full load of patients every other week, and he recently was appointed medical director of the hospital’s Behavioral Health Services;
he works part-time in an administrative position for the Department of Human Services MedQuest office, helping to set the tone for mental health services in the state by reviewing Medicaid plans and new contracts to ensure that psychiatric services are appropriate and meet medical standards; and, for the past 10 years, he has served as one of three psychiatric providers for the Institute for Human Services (IHS) and its large homeless clientele.
“People think I just want to work all the time, but there is a carefully charted path to what I do,” explains Dr. Koyanagi. “All three jobs are highly inter-related,
all concerning indigent care and care for those who are most disadvantaged. These three roles allow me to make a big imprint on policies, good inpatient psychiatric care at Castle, and specialist care for the vulnerable homeless population.”
Dr. Koyanagi’s work with IHS has been particularly rewarding, despite its challenges. In addition to seeing patients at the institute’s clinic one day a week, he
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