Sharecase Displays Best of Information Technology at UCSF

From campuswide wireless access to new mobile apps that help physicians and researchers connect with each other, UCSF has made great strides with its information technology in recent years.

IT leaders plan to highlight these successes and educate the campus community about helpful resources they may not even know about at UCSF’s first-ever Sharecase, a free, daylong tech fair on Friday, Oct. 12, at Mission Bay Conference Center.

“Everyone at UCSF is involved in IT one way or another. The involvement can be as simple as filling out your timesheet, requesting reimbursements or purchasing items. This is a unique opportunity to learn about and train yourself in one day about many IT services,” said Elazar Harel, PhD, JD, vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer at UCSF.

Harel launched the Sharecase event at both UCLA and UCSD while leading IT at those campuses, and the idea for a technology showcase event has since spread to other universities.

Since arriving at UCSF in 2010, Harel has been working to bring it to life here. The goal, he said, is to create a fun, engaging event that includes informative staff presentations, an exhibit hall with more than 40 booths, opportunities to ask questions to IT experts and vendors and raffle giveaways.

Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, highlighted Sharecase in her recent State of the University address as an example of how Operational Excellence is working to streamline campus operations. She encouraged the campus community to attend, calling it a “celebration of innovation in IT that's part of how we'll be more effective and more efficient in the future.”

One of the windows into the future of IT at UCSF is the Innovation Contest, which challenged faculty, staff and students to design a creative IT solution for the campus.

Five winning teams were selected in August from more than 50 proposals, and each team received $10,000 to implement their ideas and present them at Sharecase. The winning projects include:

• A mobile app to facilitate physicians’ rounds at the UCSF Medical Center that potentially could eliminate the need for pagers;
• A platform to streamline the transition of IT resources for new and departing employees;
• A platform for directing UCSF research papers and news stories into Twitter feeds targeted at specific disease communities;
• A platform to facilitate sharing of supplies and materials among labs; and
• A Chatter-based tool for UCSF Profiles that allows people to find experts on campus, follow their research and start online conversations with select groups.

“The IT Innovation Contest is a new experiment with the goal of encouraging creativity, risk-taking, and teamwork across multiple departments,” Harel said. “I am thrilled with the outcome and am looking forward to seeing demos of the five winning projects at Sharecase.”