L. Gregory Lawton, MD, FAAP, FAMIA

Dr. Lawton is a board-certified primary care pediatrician practicing in Chalfont, PA. Following his graduation from Muhlenberg College where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he attended Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia on an U.S. Air Force scholarship.  He completed his internship and residency in pediatrics at David Grant Medical Center, an affiliate of the University of California Medical Center, Davis. He was then assigned to serve as the pediatrician at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts until 2003, when, having achieved the rank of major and having fulfilled his commitment to the Air Force, he returned to the Philadelphia area and joined CHOP as a pediatrician in the Primary Care Network.

Dr. Lawton is also board certified in clinical informatics and is the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Medical Director for the thirty-one sites in the CHOP Primary Care Network. In 2019, he was part of the team that attained the highest level of EHR optimization and utilization (HIMSS-Stage 7) for the CHOP Primary Care Network. As a member of CHOP’s Digital Health team, he has been at the forefront of telemedicine integration, symptom checker utilization, and patient portal (MyCHOP) optimization. Dr. Lawton is also a member CHOP’s Digital Transparency Team, a group working to collaborate with patients and families by sharing laboratory, imaging, and documentation via MyCHOP as part of the 21st Century Cures Act.  He is a member of the Primary Care Network’s innovation group, The Possibilities Project, which uses practice-based research to improve health care decision-making through information technology, usability testing, and iterative process improvements.  Recognizing that the EHR can be source of frustration for his professional colleagues, Dr. Lawton has developed a course for pediatricians and advanced practice providers to help them customize and optimize their use of the EHR in the primary care setting.

Currently, Dr. Lawton is working with a multispecialty antibiotic stewardship team to improve standardized antibiotic prescribing practices across the Primary Care Network.  He presented this work both at Epic Systems Corporation in Verona, Wisconsin in 2022 and at the American Medical Informatics Association Clinician Informatics Conference in Chicago in 2023.  He is also working with teams at CHOP to investigate the use of Artificial Intelligence to improve clinician efficiency with automated messages and to reduce documentation burden for clinicians with the use of an ambient clinical intelligence tool.  His latest work involves the use of insurance and utilization data to inform procedure, laboratory, and medication orders that are incompliance with published guidelines and insurance requirements.

In May 2024, Dr. Lawton will be inducted as a Fellow of AMIA for his work in clinical informatics.