Ten teams from across the University of California won 2021 Larry L. Sautter Awards for technology innovations. The awards were presented Aug. 10, 2021 at the annual UC Tech Conference, hosted this year by UCLA.

The annual Sautter Awards, which are sponsored by the UC Information Technology Leadership Council, recognize collaborative innovations in IT that advance the university’s missions of teaching, research, public service and patient care, or that improve the effectiveness of university processes.

Established in 2000, the Sautter Awards are named after Larry L. Sautter, a UC Riverside associate vice chancellor for computing and communications who passed away in 1999. Under his leadership, a modern data network, client-server computing and improved technical support services were developed and implemented at Riverside.

The awards encourage collaboration and solution-sharing across the UC system. To be eligible, projects must be active and operational at a campus.

2021 winners and honorable mentions

Golden Awards

CA Notify Exposure System (UC San Diego Health) is an exposure notification system (ENS) designed by Google and Apple, piloted at UC San Diego and rolled out across California, with support from UC San Diego Health, to augment California COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. To date, over 10 million Californians (approximately one-third of smartphone users in the state) have downloaded the CA Notify ENS — the best adoption rate for an ENS in the United States.

UC Davis Builds a Service Hub that Offers the Total Experience (UC Davis) is an upgrade of the UC Davis Service Hub and asset management website that provides one-stop shopping for services and software, easy-to-use navigation and a virtual agent, BotRock, that enhances self-service and frees up time for help desk analysts to better support customers. Watch the video about the Service Hub.

UCHealth cBioPortal (UC Davis Health) is an open-source data visualization and exploration tool for cancer research and clinical studies, integrating information from cancer registries and patient electronic health records. UC Davis Health’s adaptation and implementation of the tool has resulted in a systemwide solution that enables data sharing across UC’s network of medical and cancer centers, and builds partnerships among UC oncologists and researchers.

Silver Awards

Technology Leadership for Vaccination across California (UC San Diego Health) recognizes UC San Diego Health’s leadership in collaborating with San Diego County to implement and support the Petco Park COVID-19 Vaccination Superstation, the first vaccine superstation implemented in California. The submission also recognizes UC San Diego Health’s subsequent work with the California Department of Technology to pilot the integration of the state-based MyTurn vaccination scheduling system with the electronic health record system, leading the way for health systems across the state. Watch the video about the vaccination superstation.

DMPHub (UCOP) provides a dynamic, machine-actionable platform for the data management plans (DMP) that funding agencies generally require in research proposals. The DMPHub enables transformation of the plan from static narrative documents into structured, interoperable data fed across stakeholders, which link metadata, repositories and institutions, and allow for real-time notifications, verification and reporting. With one click, researchers can create a public-facing landing page where they can document, organize, update and disseminate data over the course of the research project. Watch the video about the DMPHub.

Honorable Mention

UC Berkeley Building Density Dashboard (UC Berkeley) is a web application to streamline the campus space planning process during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Specifically, it allows space planners, building managers and campus-safety officials to monitor usage and calculate available physical on-campus space for research, learning and other activities. Watch the video about the dashboard.

UCR-Star: The UCR Spatio-temporal Active Repository (UC Riverside) is an interactive repository for geospatial and temporal datasets. It is built to serve the research and scientific community by making existing datasets more accessible through an attractive, easy-to-use map interface. Public users can share their own datasets on UCR-Star, allowing these datasets to be accessible and discoverable to the entire community. The goal of UCR-Star is to save scientists the hundreds of hours typically wasted discovering and downloading thousands of datasets. Users can explore and download datasets without downloading complex software or requiring training. Watch the video about UCR-Star.

Emergency Expansion of Digital Health Tools for COVID Response (UCLA Health) recognizes UCLA Health IT’s response to the COVID 19 pandemic by launching video visits and Care Companion remote monitoring. Telehealth visits rose from 500 per month to 2,500 per day. Patients were able to stay at home safely while maintaining continuity of care with providers. Patients also could manage COVID symptoms from home using the COVID Care Companion module; those who were hospitalized could connect with their families when visitation was limited.

UCPath Reporting Instance Data Extraction Framework (UC Berkeley, UCOP, UC San Diego) pulls data from the AWS-based Reporting Instance for UCPath — UC’s systemwide payroll and HR system — and sends the data to UC campuses, where staff can import them into a local database for campus reporting.

Pushing Boundaries, Uniting Campus: Secure Research Data + Compute (UC Berkeley) describes a service that provides secure computing and storage platforms, expert consultants, a community of practice and the combined talents of a deeply collaborative partnership of campus units to researchers working with highly sensitive (P4 and HIPAA) data.

Congratulations to all of this year’s participants! To read more about each winning project and all of this year’s applications, visit the Sautter Award Program website.

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