Dear Colleagues,

I often say that it’s our people who drive our success and are at the core of everything we do. It is in this spirit that today I’d like to recognize one truly exceptional member of our team and his invaluable contributions to our health system and to patient care near and far.

Last month it was announced that Atul Butte, MD, PhD, is this year's recipient of the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, the highest honor in biomedical informatics given to an individual who has made an indelible impression on the intersecting fields of health care and biomedicine. It will be presented to Dr. Butte at the American Medical Informatics Association’s annual symposium in November. Morris Collen was founder of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and a pioneer developer of electronic health records (EHRs) in the early 1960s.

This is the latest honor among Dr. Butte’s staggering list of accomplishments as a clinician-scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur at the forefront of the precision medicine revolution. In July he received the Association for Molecular Pathology’s Award for Excellence for his groundbreaking work in advancing molecular diagnostics and computational health sciences. Among countless other accolades, he’s been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and recognized by the Obama Administration as an Open Science Champion of Change. And through it all, he’s maintained an invariable kindness and generosity of spirit that we can all aspire to, always making the time to support and mentor others, and in doing so, strengthening the collaborative backbone of our organization. 

During his career at UCSF Health, Dr. Butte’s work has focused on building and applying computational tools that convert massive data sets into an improved understanding of health and the delivery of health care. As the inaugural director of the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, Dr. Butte has established himself as a thought leader in the translation of AI models into the practice of health care, and the care required to do this responsibly. His lab has led several key efforts to harness the power of AI in patient care settings, most recently using large language models (LLMs) to identify Emergency Department patients with the most acute needs.

Since 2018, Dr. Butte has also served as UC Health’s chief data scientist and the co-founder and leader of the Center for Data-driven Insights and Innovation (CDI2), where data from across the University of California’s six academic health centers is aggregated to improve the care of our patients and operational efficiencies. As a recent study published in JAMA illustrates, the CDI2’s transformative use of system-level, real-world clinical data has accelerated research into better treatments for type 2 diabetes by yielding insights in a matter of weeks that typically take years. Dr. Butte's leadership was similarly invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic when the CDI2 team produced data-driven resources about the virus that supported executive leadership, state and federal government, and clinicians in their response efforts.

Dr. Butte’s career exemplifies the sort of passionate innovation in thinking and doing that sets UCSF Health apart as a preeminent destination for patient care. I hope his remarkable accomplishments inspire you, as they do me, to continue pushing boundaries in our individual and collective pursuits of excellence in service of our mission. 

Thank you for everything you do for our patients and each other.

Sincerely,

Suresh Gunasekaran
President & CEO
UCSF Health