Ten teams across the University of California — including one led by UCOP — have won the 2018 Larry L. Sautter Award for using information technology to make university operations more effective and efficient and to better serve faculty, staff, students and patients.

Cyber Strong UC, a collaboration among UCOP and 11 locations, won a Gold Award.

“I was incredibly pleased and surprised to learn that we won a Gold Sautter Award for the Cyber Strong UC project,” said Julie Goldstein, an IT security analyst at UCOP. “Surprised because ours is a non-technical project, so we didn’t know if it would even be considered. Incredibly pleased because this award is such a huge affirmation of the importance of the work and results of this project. While the project team believes that this is an incredibly useful, innovative project that epitomizes collaboration and sharing across the UC system, it is thrilling to learn that UC’s IT leadership agrees. I feel privileged to be part of this collaboration and to work with such a wonderful team.”

The annual Sautter Award program, which is sponsored by the UC Information Technology Leadership Council, recognizes 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. The award encourages collaboration and solution sharing across the UC system.

Systemwide Chief Information Officer Tom Andriola announced this year’s winners Aug. 14, at the UC Computing Services Conference in Davis.

The 2018 award winners and honorable mentions are:

Gold Awards

Joint Services (UC Irvine Health and UC San Diego Health) is a strategic initiative that combined the IT Services teams at UC Irvine Health and UC San Diego Health. This merger has positioned the two organizations to better respond to external financial pressures and competition, as well as more effectively serve customers. The joint services approach already has enabled the two health systems to share technology, reduce costs, provide support 24 hours a day/seven days a week and host shared clinical summits.

Process Palooza: UC San Diego LEANing toward Success (UC San Diego) was an event that engendered a campus-wide movement for continuous improvement and business excellence using Lean Six Sigma, a methodology for improving performance. The event offered workshops, networking opportunities, and a competition for teams to analyze and offer suggestions to improve real-life campus issues. Some of the suggestions have already been implemented and have saved time and money while increasing customer satisfaction. Process Palooza also inspired a new campuswide Business Excellence Community of Practice at UCSD, and is being shared across UC and at national conferences.

Cyber Strong UC: Year-Round Information Security Awareness Campaigns (UC Office of the President), in collaboration with 11 locations, created a series of themed toolkits of customizable resources available to all UC campuses to raise cyber security awareness. Through this project, teams across UC collaborate and share ideas and resources, making it more feasible for them to maintain year-round cyber security awareness campaigns to help protect the university’s assets and people.

Silver Awards

American Viticultural Areas Digitizing Project (UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara) resulted in the first free and publicly accessible database providing the boundaries of grape-growing regions, or American Viticultural Areas. Access to the boundaries data provides researchers with an important tool for examining scientific, economic and historical aspects of viticulture, which is an important industry in California and the U.S. It also facilitates research into emerging environmental questions related to climate change and that have implications for wine production.

Enhanced Data and Service Sharing through Innovative Campus Collaboration (UC Santa Barbara) is an initiative to standardize tools and processes used by UC Santa Barbara’s decentralized IT departments for application development and integration. The result is a full-featured centralized platform, created by a cross-departmental team of application developers, that supports real-time integrations of campus systems, reduces the need for shadow systems, increases data security, and standardizes how data and services are shared across campus.

Honorable Mentions

PULSE EMS Integration (UC Davis Health) connected the electronic health record system at UC Davis Health with the State of California’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) patient “look up” system, or PULSE. The goal is to make the most up-to-date and relevant patient information available to disaster health care volunteers in the event of a state-declared emergency. The system provides a process to look up patients and view standard clinical documents.

Vital Record Death Reporting Integration (UC Davis Health) is a collaboration among UC Davis, the National Center for Health Statistics and the California Department of Public Health, resulting in a platform for providers to electronically report deaths to the state while including all necessary information for death certification. The platform eliminates a manual, paper-based process and saves administrative costs for the organizations that either report deaths or are required to maintain the information. A 12-month pilot of the platform demonstrated that deaths could be certified in the same day, instead of taking weeks, months or even longer in cases of misplaced paperwork.

Implementing an Enterprise Master Person Index (UCSF) is a single database of over 350,000 patient records from UCSF Health, John Muir Health and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. This index uses algorithms to ensure that patients are uniquely identified and all their information is stored on one medical record – no matter which doctor or clinic they visit. Duplicate and incomplete records for a patient can lead to adverse medication interactions, unnecessary or repeat tests and procedures, and increased cost of care. By sharing medical information across the three health systems, the index increases patient safety and reduces costs.

Enrollment Authorization System (EASy) (UC San Diego) replaced the intensive manual and in-person processes UC San Diego students previously used to add, drop or change classes. The new enrollment system uses real-time data and streamlines the process of requesting and granting authorization to enroll in classes for students, faculty and staff. The online system also enables department staff to pre-authorize hundreds of students in seconds, a process that used to take hours.

UCSF Recognize – Creating a Culture of Recognition and Gratitude (UCSF) is website that allows UCSF employees to thank each other and acknowledge colleagues for a job well done. With an easy-to-use interface, recognize.ucsf.edu allows people to send their colleagues a digital card or email that will be published to the website and shared with their manager. The purpose of the site and the initiative behind it is to boost morale, promote team culture and celebrate employee excellence.

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