Alumni Profile: Anna Tanner, MD’95
An Accidental Career
Anna Tanner, MD’95, a pediatrician and global expert on eating disorders, landed in an “accidental career” brought about by the growing number of youth in her Georgia community who were developing eating disorders.
“It wasn’t what I carved out to do. I didn’t hang out a shingle. I didn’t even focus my areas of interest on eating disorders while I was a medical student, then a resident and a clinical instructor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. It was a need I saw in my community,” she said.
Tanner, who lives in Duluth, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta, said her Vanderbilt University School of Medicine education and training at VUMC prepared her well for her career.
“I had great mentors in adolescent medicine (and endocrinology), specifically around eating disorders (former faculty members Laurie Mitan, MD, Ovidio Bermudez, MD, and Jennifer Najjar, MD) and a long incubation period in what good eating disorders care really looks like,” she said.
When Tanner joined a general pediatrics practice in Gwinnett County, she and her partners quickly realized that eating disorders impact all populations. The age of onset is now under 12 in almost one-third of youth diagnosed with eating disorders.
She quickly became the eating disorders specialist in her practice. During her 18 years with the group, the population of patients with eating disorders grew to such an extent that she wasn’t able to see all of them.
“I wasn’t providing care in a multidisciplinary setting,” she said. “They were seeing me in my office, then driving across Atlanta to see a dietitian, somewhere else to see a psychiatrist and somewhere else to see a therapist. If they needed more support, they were often traveling out of state.”
Tanner left her practice eight years ago to help establish Veritas Collaborative, which became Accanto Health, an eating disorders treatment facility in Georgia. In addition to her patient load there, she became a highly regarded national and international speaker, writer and advocate on the topic of eating disorders.
She helped design a certification process (exam, course and syllabus) for providers with the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals. She also helped lead a three-part webinar on eating disorders in children and adolescents offered in 2024 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Tanner, who has since left Veritas, said patients and their families continue to have challenges navigating a system that “isn’t mature. If your child has cancer, they would be referred to a pediatric cancer facility. We just don’t have those systems in place for eating disorders.”
She plans to continue her long-term roles as adjunct faculty for Emory University and Morehouse College and will continue to work closely with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.