WILMINGTON — Gov. John Carney on Thursday recognized the COVID-19 response team from the Delaware Courts’ Judicial Information Center for delivering “innovative, impactful, sustainable and highly efficient business processes and services.”

During a virtual ceremony, the team of 16 received the Government Efficiency and Accountability Review Board’s P3 Innovation & Efficiency Award and was honored by the governor as a team that “will serve as clear role models for other organizations” in the state.

“I am proud of our JIC team and what they accomplished during this challenging and difficult year for the Delaware judicial branch,” said Chief Justice Collins J. Seitz Jr. “I know I speak for everyone in not only the judicial branch but the entire justice system when I say this award was well-earned and well-deserved.

“This team allowed our justice system to continue to function safely during the pandemic. JIC provided us with tools, solutions and processes that we will continue to use long after this pandemic ends.”

Led by Deputy State Court Administrator/Information Systems Manager Kenneth Kelemen, the members of the award-winning team are James Weister, Kevin Bowers, Amy Whitman, John Williams, Saoud Khan, Christopher Minner, Shawn Facen-Simmons, James Cole, Ann Hsu, Ryan Fontello, Christopher Talley, Angel Morales, Stephen Spalluto, Edward Hall, Wade Heverin and Karen Puckham.

At the outset of the pandemic, JIC became a centerpiece of the courts’ efforts to keep operations going.

JIC responded by mobilizing a team to assess the varying information technology needs of every court in every county and then procured and deployed resources statewide. JIC also facilitated remote access for court employees, tested the security and sufficiency of different remote solutions and then provided training and technical support for court staff.

The JIC team also created more than a dozen webpages, for both judicial branch employees and the public, to provide status updates on court operations and new policies and procedures that were implemented to deal with the pandemic and to make available new online forms to ensure continued court services.

As a part of this massive effort, JIC secured licenses for 226 users of Zoom and four other licensed webinar accounts.

The Zoom licenses allowed administrators to hold multiple town hall meetings with court employees and justice system partners to communicate critical information about judicial branch operations and COVID-19 planning in a timely and effective way.

Hand-in-hand with the Zoom access, JIC procured and installed equipment in courtrooms and offices to facilitate more than 33,000 virtual hearings, meetings and remote trials between April 1, 2020, and April 1, 2021.

One of the team’s most innovative solutions involved PCs and video equipment mounted on small carts that could be moved — from courtroom to courtroom and from place to place within a courtroom — as needed.

Ultimately, JIC was able to deploy 43 of these video carts across the state between May and December 2020, allowing remote access in 75 courtrooms across each of Delaware’s six courts in 24 different buildings.

The team was so successful in helping the courts transition to video that the Court of Chancery, the nation’s premiere court for resolving business disputes, was able to use it for remote proceedings without a significant backlog or delay. The use of video also allowed other courts to move forward with critical and urgent hearings and proceedings.