All year, every day, the UC IT community supports modernization, efficiency, and innovation. Whether big or small, every step is progress. UC IT had some remarkable achievements this year that you should know about. Here is my list of the top five, in reverse order, a la David Letterman. What’s your list?
5. Systemwide deal for cybersecurity
The campuses and health systems together chose a technology partner, FireEye, to assist in modernizing UC’s cybersecurity landscape. After intense negotiations, UC locations can now leverage FireEye’s full portfolio of offerings. Locations also collaborated to determine minimum standards for deployment. This is the power of working together to achieve more for all, in this case, greater protection of the University and its assets.
4. One database – 14 million electronic patient records
The five UC health systems aggregated their patient records into one large environment – in the era of big data, size matters. The program received rave reviews from senior University leadership and has spurred exciting conversations about UC’s role, on a national level, with the Cancer Moonshot and Precision Medicine initiatives.
3. Spin-out success
2016 saw the first UC IT commercial spinout with the creation of Corelight out of the Berkeley Lab. Risk and Safety Solutions got its first customers in the software-as-a-service market. And other programs, like Open Berkeley (UCB) and CropManage (ANR), have demonstrated UC IT’s growing ability to identify and articulate value propositions beyond the border of the campus or health system. What a great contribution to President Napolitano’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative!
2. Shared electronic health record system
The challenges of health care in the US today mean UC Health has to quickly evolve, invest, and grow. UC Irvine and UC Riverside both needed a new electronic health record (EHR) system to support this growth. But large investments are challenging in the current market. So they aligned goals and plans with UCSD and began integrating a single EHR across all three sites. And they’re saving the University tens of millions of dollars.
1. Slack explosion across UC IT
Through the grassroots efforts of UC IT folks at all locations, the UC Tech team on Slack took off fast. It grew from 200 to 1300 users in 5 months, achieving scale three times faster than the UC IT Blog and twice as fast as the UC IT Professionals LinkedIn group. We’re looking for ways to support this platform at UC and double our numbers again in 2017. If we connect more across UC – just think what we can do!
Once Slack for Enterprise is available should we consider funding it at the UCOP level and making it available to each UC location? The enterprise version will allow for AD integration and administration tools for DLP and eDiscovery. Slack has gained a lot of traction at each campus and having a system agreement with the right integration in place will provide better utilization and security.