Nothing beats gold in UC’s Larry L. Sautter Awards Program for Innovation in Information Technology, and out of three Golden Awards given this year, UC Davis won two of them.

One gold went to Information and Educational Technology’s Client Success unit for its Service Hub upgrades focused on customer experience, and the other went to UC Davis Health’s Data Provisioning Core in IT Health Informatics for its implementation of the cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics that is soon to be available as a shared system for all of UC Health.

The UC Information Technology Leadership Council sponsors the Sautter Awards, established in 2000 in memory of Larry L. Sautter, who, at the time of his death in 1999, served as UC Riverside’s associate vice chancellor for Computing and Communications. He led his campus in the development and implementation of a modern data network, client server computing and improved technical support services.

The awards program recognizes faculty and staff for innovations that advance teaching, research, public service and patient care, or that  improve the effectiveness of university processes, and encourages collaboration and solution-sharing across the UC system.

The council presented its 2021 awards Tuesday (Aug. 10) during the UC Tech conference hosted by UCLA.

See all of the 2021 award winners and honorable mentions and additional applications.

UC Davis Service Hub

IET’s project description for the awards selection committee details how the Client Success unit upgraded the already well-established Service Hub that provides a suite of IT service and support for campus. “It’s not enough to use a best-in-class application like ServiceNow for service delivery. Our laser focus is on the customer experience. One thing we never lose sight of, no matter the project, is to consider the customer perspective every step of the way. The project team was guided by this principle when they set out to create a next-generation Service Hub with ‘total experience’ in mind.”

The Service Hub underwent three significant upgrades in 2020-21:

• Automating and improving efficiencies with regard to campus-licensed software delivery
• Migrating and integrating the service catalog in Drupal into the Service Hub’s ServiceNow platform.
• Adding a virtual agent to further promote self-service, improve the user experience and free up time for help desk analysts

“Every year a percentage of our population is new to campus and will not be aware of legacy websites or processes,” said Anita Nichols, director of Client Success and project lead. “Our team is passionate about bringing information to where our customer is and removing these barriers.”

IET’s Viji Murali, chief information officer and vice provost, said: “We are honored to receive the 2021 Larry L. Sautter Golden Award. I am so pleased that the incredible work of the Client Success team has been recognized by the UC IT Leadership Council.”

Project team: Ahna Heller, Brenda Williams, Dan Wright, Earl Duque, Ellen Friel, Erica Avila, Jesalyn Smith, Katherine Stoddard, Kevin Loenker, Mark Deamer, Matt Clark, Maxim Chiao, Mike Waid, Minor Rojas, Oz Shaar Moshe, Robert Weibezahl, Roger Kunkel, Ron Burt, Tobi Paton and Walter Allen.

UC Health cBioPortal

In its project description for the awards selection committee, UC Davis Health’s Data Provisioning Core explained the problem of UC Health’s five comprehensive cancer centers (including UC Davis’) all using a variety of genomic lab tests from a diverse set of vendors to assess treatment paths for cancer and other chronic patients. “Lab results of these assays are still often manually scanned into the [electronic health record] with content that is not searchable or shareable in any forms, thereby resulting in usage that is one patient, one report at a time, and a constrained group of physicians or researchers,” the problem statement continued.

“This single-use and limited view of the resulting data and metadata continues to create barriers to clinicians and researchers in accessing the molecular profiles and clinical attributes of patients as part of the full potential of treatment outcomes.”

The project team turned to cBioPortal, an open-source data visualization and exploration platform for cancer molecular profiles, adapting it to provide an interactive exploration view of UC-curated cancer genomics data sets.

“The infrastructure, tooling and methodology from the UC Davis Health implementation of cBioPortal resulted in a new UC-wide solution that has standardized and generalized approaches for use by other UC sites, and enables data sharing and cancer cohort discovery across the network of UC medical and cancer centers.”

Project leadership: Kent Anderson, Nicholas Anderson, Jason Yeates Adams and Sharon L. Myers. Sponsors: John McPherson and Primo N. Lara Jr. Project team: Cy Huynh, Matthew Renquist, Jared Cobabe, Joseph Cawood, Albert William Riedl and Christopher Lambertus.