The Ilios Curriculum Management System, created at UCSF, and now serving other UC’s and institutions across the globe, provides a unique solution to seamlessly manage and deliver dynamic, accessible, and impactful curricula to health care professionals. Learn more about this unique product and how the team renews it “ongoing” to ensure not only maximal effectiveness in its primary role (curriculum management) but in its ongoing security and uptime. This year, the team won to UC Tech Golden Larry L. Sautter Award for Innovation in IT (tying with UCLA). To learn more, read the original submission.
Summary
The Ilios Curriculum Management System addresses the needs of the Health Professions educational community by providing a user-friendly, accessible, flexible, and robust web application to collect, manage, analyze, and deliver curricular information.
Built by and for the health professions, Ilios supports the sharing of curriculum outcomes and materials among programs, departments, schools, and institutions, while maintaining the flexibility to accommodate the unique practices of each respectively, within our diverse health professions community.
Since 2021 there have been 131 releases of the Ilios application, demonstrating the team’s commitment to maintaining a usable, accessible, and secure platform that meets the needs of students, staff, and faculty at UCSF, as well as dozens of health science institutions, INCLUDING UC IRVINE, AND THOSE around the world.
How “ongoing” innovation allows Ilios to stay ahead of security vulnerabilities and maintain 100% uptime
Innovation in the Ilios platform is constant and ongoing. For the purposes of this application, we have chosen to highlight some specific major project goals that have been accomplished in the last three years, but the discrete changes in Ilios should also be considered as part of a continuous commitment to long-term viability and engineering excellence. The pace of change in the Ilios project is incredible, yet also sustainable, as sustainability was a founding principle in the re-write of the platform 10 years ago. The team delivers new changes on a weekly basis, can address security vulnerabilities within hours, and has maintained near 100% uptime over the application’s lifetime, and its robustness compared to other similar projects makes the project an innovation to be celebrated.
Specific Innovations:
JSON Web Token (JWT) app-specific B2B authentication token system (October 2023):
The implementation of JWT authentication and authorization in Ilios provides a solution to one of the most difficult problems in authenticated data exchange for an API data provider: transactions must be scoped and authenticated to valid users, but when those users leave the university or switch roles, the data exchange should not break – a symptom typical of applications using traditional or legacy types of authentication and authorization. The Ilios JWT service token approach provides significantly more security and stability to integrated systems leveraging the Ilios API and data by allowing API transactions to be scoped to a requesting service, expired on a regular schedule, and re-issued to the system without relying on the role of any specific user.
GraphQL API (April 2022):
Ilios was built as an API-first JSON:API standards-compliant application and is designed to manage data and exchange it with other systems. While this standard has proven to be an exceptional format for providing data to the web UI, and as an interchange format, it is too verbose and inflexible for the reporting needs of the application users. For this reason, a full-featured GraphQL endpoint was added to Ilios. GraphQL is a query language for APIs which provides a complete and understandable description of the data in the API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more, and enables powerful developer tools.
World-class Accessibility (July 2023):
Ilios was built to be accessible and has consistently exceeded the requirements for accessibility of student data. During a live-assisted technology review of Ilios, the users performing the evaluation called the application “the best of its kind that they had ever tested”. The team’s commitment to digital accessibility is shown in the hundreds of automated a11y tests and through regular live testing, but it is exemplified by our ongoing efforts to ensure Ilios works on low-powered devices and not just the latest browsers and phones. Through contributions to, and participation in, the global a11y community, Ilios continues to make strides in the way the application is built and delivered to ensure accessibility and an outstanding experience for ALL users.
Container-based, cloud-native AWS deployment:
Today, Ilios at UCSF is hosted as a set of docker containers in AWS Fargate, the auto-scaling elastic container management environment at AWS, and is integrated with several other managed AWS services, including RDS, Elasticsearch, and S3. The project has near-perfect uptime, and new releases can be pushed out at any time with zero downtime. Its deployment via Fargate allows the application to respond to changes in load demand and user needs instantly and can be patched to resolve security vulnerabilities in a matter of minutes. This super-modern architecture is the result of constant evaluation and exploration by the Ilios team and their willingness to take on solving difficult problems in campus policy, cloud provider features, and technical implementation. Most of this technology did not exist a few years ago, and very few applications have been able to make the transition from the traditional, monolithic LAMP stack to a true cloud native architecture
Project team members
- Brandon Lo, Education IT
- Dave Leonard, School of Medicine
- Jason Hedrick, Education IT
- Jon Johnson, Education IT
- Sascha Cohen, School of Medicine
- Stefan Topfstedt, Education IT
Author
Information Technology
UCSF
Related Reading
INTERVIEW: Jon Johnson, UCSF, shares management principals underpinning Ilios