Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UC San Diego Health clinical informatics team set the pace with the world's first publication describing EHR optimization for COVID, the first imaging AI tool in production to help identify COVID pneumonia, the first pilot of smartphone exposure notification in California, and the first health system in the United States to issue digital vaccine records. This was followed by several NEJM articles with the first real-world effectiveness study of the COVID vaccines (March 2021), followed by the first United States demonstration of waning effectiveness in healthcare workers (September 2021), prompting the CDC to recommend booster shots for those at high occupational risk. In this talk, learn the stories behind these accomplishments and how the pandemic catalyzed the UC San Diego Health journey to becoming a learning health system.