Dr. Steven R. Kanner earned his AB from Harvard College in 1965 and his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969. He interned in medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and completed his medical residency at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he was a Clinical Scholar of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine.
Because of his experiences working in the US Public Health Service after internship, and his concerns about the adequacy of our health care system, Dr. Kanner earned a masters in management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1974.
He subsequently was chief of medical care for the Massachusetts department of mental health, where he was responsible for achieving substantial innovations and improvements in health care for the mentally retarded that had eluded a generation of government officials.
From 1988 through the early 1990’s he also founded two medical software companies and developed one of the first effective electronic medical records systems in the country.
Dr. Kanner has been in active clinical practice since 1979. For the nine years before forming Orchard Health Care, he was one of the two busiest primary care physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, personally responsible for over 1900 patients.
Dr. Kanner formed Orchard Health Care in 2006 because he is strongly committed to personalized primary care medicine and to the importance of providing each individual with excellent preventive care and education as well as illness care.
He enthusiastically teaches medical students and is a long-term faculty member of Harvard Medical School. He also is an enthusiastic orchardist, growing commercial quantities of apples, peaches, pears, plums, and cherries. Orchard Health Care members enjoy a family apple-cidering at the Kanner Family Orchard during harvest time in the fall.
Dr. Kanner and Orchard Health Care affiliate with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
