Introduction

CSL has undertaken a number of projects which seek to further develop Information Technology (IT) that supports the goal of reducing the cost of health care services. The goal of the CSL Health Care projects is to advance the applicability of IT in the health care environment. The more effective IT is for health care applications, the lower the cost of health care services and the greater the advancement of IT itself.

More specifically, the CSL Health Care projects have the following goals:

• Identify the IT requirements for health care applications.
• Identify IT areas which can be most effectively used in health care applications.
• Promote development of those areas and participate in their development.
• Advance IT in those areas so that IT can better provide solutions to health care problems.
• Improve the synergy between the health care and IT industries as well as between the technologies.

More information about the CSL Health Care projects is available on the World Wide Web (WWW). The Universal Resource Locator (URL) is:
http://hissa.ncsl.nist.gov/rbac/proj/

Among the basic technologies required to support health care applications are:

• Application Engineering - making the development of reliable applications more efficient.
• Multimedia Information Representation, Storage, and Retrieval - reducing the time to access information and the amount of storage needed to store information.
• Interoperability - enabling the rapid reliable exchange of information electronically.
• Security and Integrity - minimizing the possibility of unauthorized access and modification/destruction of information.
• Human Machine Interface - making the use of IT more accessible.
• Intelligent Agent - automating knowledge discovery and business processes.

This paper describes two of the ongoing projects in Application Engineering. These are ``Software Engineering Environments for Distributed Applications in Health Care'' and ``The Use of Role Based Access Control in Health Care Information Security.''