Getting in touch with the practice
The form below is for general, non-urgent inquiries — asking whether the practice is a reasonable fit, describing in broad terms what you are looking for, or starting a referral. Please read the emergency information first, and the note about what not to write.
Emergency and crisis resources
If this is an emergency, do not use this form.
Messages sent through this website are not monitored continuously. This practice does not provide emergency services, urgent care, or after-hours crisis coverage, and no one may be reading this inbox at the moment you write. If you need help now, use one of the following instead.
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988. Free and confidential, 24 hours a day, every day, across the United States.
911 — call 911 if you or someone else is in immediate physical danger.
Your nearest emergency department — go directly, or ask someone to take you. Under federal law, a hospital emergency department must provide a medical screening examination to anyone who comes in and asks to be seen, whatever their insurance or ability to pay.
Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 to reach a trained crisis counselor by text message.
Already a patient here? Urgent clinical problems should not go through this form — see Existing patients below.
Send a message
Tell us how to reach you and, in a sentence or two, what you are looking for. Keep it general — the detail belongs in a conversation, not in a web form.
Submitting this form does not create a physician–patient relationship and does not establish care. [State the realistic window in which someone reviews new inquiries — for example, business days only, and roughly how long. Publish only what you can consistently meet: patients read a stated response time as a commitment, and it is the first thing quoted back to you when someone is unhappy.]
[Technical: put the real practice-domain address inside the empty data-fallback-email="" attribute on the form above. If the backend is down, that address is what the error message offers the patient as a way through. It is empty on purpose — until it is filled the failure message tells the patient to telephone instead, which is safe but sends them to a number this page has not published yet, so fill in both.]
[Technical: revisit the "How did you hear about the practice?" options once you have a few months of real referrals — the list above is a guess, and a guessed list collects noise. If you intend to thank referring clinicians, add a free-text follow-up so you capture the name. Keep the option list and the field table in functions/api/contact.js in step with each other.]
Where to find us
- Address [Street address, suite, city, state and ZIP of the office where patients are seen. If the practice is telehealth-only, say that here instead of leaving it blank — but note that the Medical Board of California requires a current address of record, and a home address published on a public website is difficult to take back.]
- Telephone [Main practice number, and one line on who answers it and when. Use a dedicated practice line rather than a personal mobile — anything published here is scraped within days and dialled by sales callers, and you cannot change a number patients already have.]
- Fax [Secure fax number for referrals and records. Hospitals, pharmacies, and outside clinics still move records by fax, and a referring office will ask for this before anything else. A HIPAA-compliant e-fax service with a signed BAA is fine; a consumer fax app is not.]
- Practice email [An address on the practice domain — for example something@mybrainstimulation.com — with a signed business associate agreement in place with the mail provider. Note: ppellionisz@stanford.edu is a university-governed account, subject to Stanford's IT, records, and retention policies, and is not an appropriate destination for patient health information from a private practice. Keep the two separate from day one.]
- Office hours [The days and hours you actually answer the phone and see patients, plus what happens outside them. Do not publish hours you cannot keep — this reads as a commitment, and unanswered calls during posted hours are a common source of complaints.]
- Telehealth states [List only the states where you currently hold an active, unrestricted medical licence. What governs is where the patient is physically sitting during the visit, not where you are — treating someone located in a state where you are not licensed is unlicensed practice in that state. Include your plan for patients who travel.]
A note on email Ordinary email is not encrypted end to end and is not a HIPAA-protected channel. Please do not send health information, records, or images by email — to any address on this page. [Name the secure channel patients and clinicians should use instead — patient portal, secure fax, or a HIPAA-compliant secure-message link — and put that name here. Patients will use email by default unless you give them somewhere specific to go.]
For referring clinicians
Referrals are welcome from psychiatrists, primary care physicians, neurologists, and psychotherapists. A short, well-assembled packet shortens the first visit considerably and means the consultation starts from what has already been tried rather than from scratch.
Confirm the patient knows and agrees
Please make sure the patient expects to be contacted and has agreed to the referral, and send a release of information covering the records you are transmitting. Without it, the practice cannot acknowledge receipt back to you.
Send the referral and the records together
A one-paragraph clinical summary plus the records listed below is usually enough to triage. [Specify the route referring offices should use — secure fax number, portal, or a HIPAA-compliant secure upload link — and say plainly which routes are not acceptable for PHI. Referring staff will default to plain email or the general contact form unless you tell them otherwise, and that puts the disclosure on your side of the line.]
What happens next
The referral is reviewed and the referring clinician is told whether the practice can take the patient on. [State who reviews referrals, how the referring office is notified, and the realistic turnaround from receipt to reply. If the practice is closed to new patients or maintaining a waiting list at any point, say so here rather than leaving referring offices to guess.]
Records that make the biggest difference
- Medication trial history — agents tried, dose reached, how long each was maintained at that dose, and why each was stopped. Duration and dose adequacy matter more than the length of the list; "failed sertraline" is not interpretable without them.
- Prior neuromodulation — any previous TMS or ECT course: protocol or device, target, number of sessions completed, response and how it was measured, side effects, and whether the patient relapsed and over what interval.
- Recent imaging — structural MRI or CT and the radiology reports, plus any functional imaging. Please send the report and, where possible, the study itself; reports alone are often insufficient for planning.
- Recent laboratory work and ECG — including thyroid studies, metabolic panel, and levels for any narrow-therapeutic-index medication the patient takes.
- A safety history — prior attempts, hospitalizations, and current risk as you assess it, stated directly.
- Who is prescribing now — and whether you intend to continue prescribing, co-manage, or transfer care. Ambiguity here is the most common cause of medication gaps during a handoff.
Scope of what is offered clinically [Before this page goes live, state plainly and in one place which treatments are available to a referred patient in this practice and which are research-protocol-only. Dr. Pellionisz's LIFU, fMRI-guided TMS, and kTMP work is documented as investigational research conducted under UCSF, Stanford, and NIMH-sponsored protocols with their own eligibility criteria — a referring clinician reading this page must not be left with the impression that a patient can be referred here and receive those modalities as clinical care. If enrollment inquiries are welcome, say so separately and route them to the trial's own screening process.]
Existing patients
If you are already established with the practice, please use the routes below rather than the general inquiry form. Messages sent through the public form are not part of your medical record and are not read on a clinical schedule.
Patient portal
[Name the portal, give the sign-in URL, and say what it should be used for — scheduling, documents, non-urgent messages — and what it should not be used for. Also state whether portal messages are billable, since several EHR vendors now enable that by default and patients are entitled to know before they write.]
Prescription refills
[Describe the refill route exactly: whether the request should come from the pharmacy or the patient, how much lead time to allow, and how controlled substances differ — they cannot be refilled the same way and require a scheduled visit interval. Give a concrete number of business days so patients stop calling on day one.]
After hours and coverage
[State the coverage arrangement in writing: who covers evenings, weekends, and vacations, how a patient reaches that person, what qualifies as a call worth making, and what is directed to 988 or an emergency department instead. California requires that patients in active treatment have a documented way to reach a physician or designated coverage; a page that says only "call 911" is not a coverage arrangement.]
Records and forms [Add the route for records requests, disability and leave paperwork, and letters — who to send the request to, what form is required, the turnaround, and whether a fee applies. Under California Health & Safety Code 123110 a patient's request to inspect or copy their record has a statutory deadline, so this route should exist before the first request arrives rather than after.]