UCSF 2.0 Pursues Big Ideas to Chart Its Direction to 2025

Smart Clinic for Fully Connected Health. UCSF Eliminates Inner City Asthma. UCSF Researchers Cure Cancer Over Lunch.

These are three of the fictional headlines that faculty and staff envisioned in day-long workshops as they look toward the future of UCSF in 2025. It’s a time when technology enhances health and devices and data empower patients and providers as partners in care. It’s a time when experts across the public and private sector work together to end diseases that seem intractable today. And it’s a time when increased opportunities for spontaneous conversations among scientists and scholars lead to monumental discoveries that improve health and well being.

Imagining a world where UCSF continues and enhances its 150-year record of biomedical innovation to make a major impact in the 21st century on health and health care is part of the University’s strategic planning effort called UCSF 2.0.

The workshops, facilitated by the nonprofit strategic planning firm Institute for the Future (IFTF), resulted in brainstorming headlines for the future, and creating graphic maps depicting the various directions explored.

These ideas are now being shared and explored across the University in the ongoing long-term visioning effort led by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Jeff Bluestone, PhD, Mark Laret, chief executive officer of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, and John Ford, vice chancellor of University Development and Alumni Affairs.

The four-phase UCSF 2.0 initiative began with UCSF 2025, an online game that leveraged the power of social media to generate more than 25,000 ideas from more than 2,500 participants both inside and outside the University.

Designed by IFTF,  a firm that focuses on analyzing and interpreting trends of the future in social media, communications, and health and education, the 36-hour UCSF 2025 game was the most successful gaming platform of its kind run by IFTF.

The sheer number and speed of play at UCSF signaled an appetite for real-time discussions about key issues and trends to advance UCSF’s leadership role in health, science, education, and, closer to home, how to improve the quality of campus life and boost efforts in sustainability.

The game resulted in the identification of a number of themes, across research, education and patient care. From October through December, a series of focus groups and in person workshops were held, with participants representing a cross-section of the UCSF community going further into depth exploring some of the key themes.

Maintaining momentum in UCSF 2.0 is more important than ever in this time of leadership transition as Sam Hawgood, MBBS, prepares to take the helm in April after Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, leaves UCSF to become CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hawgood, currently dean of the UCSF School of Medicine and vice chancellor for clinical affairs, plans to continue to advance UCSF’s initiatives in both clinical and basic science, including its leadership in the emerging field of precision medicine, bringing together the fields of genetics, molecular research, bioinformatics and medicine to provide predictive and precise therapies for patients.

“We’re well down the road on those initiatives, and they will continue as we overlay the forward-looking 2.0 issues,” he said in story about his new appointment approved by the UC Regents. “We’re not going to retrench. We’re not going into hiatus. We’re going to push forward.”

Over the next few months, big ideas will be refined and compiled into “idea maps” that can be incorporated into a long-term vision for the University. During the final phase, ideas will be selected for further planning and assigned to owners and teams for development of specific strategic plans.