The National Institutes of Health wants to give doctors, nurses, researchers, and other personnel at its Bethesda, Md., clinical center easy access to the applications, Web sites, and databases they need to do their jobs. The federal agency plans to use Citrix Systems Inc.'s NFuse Elite portal-management tool, released last week, to deliver role-specific content and applications via a browser.

The NIH will rely on Web-services standards to assemble the content and deliver applications, and use the tool's management capabilities to tie into the business directory and link apps and databases with the units that need them. The goal, CIO Richard Gordon says, is to give hospital staff quick access to all the information they need, even when they're making rounds or working off-site. He hopes to have the system live by year's end.

IT executives are increasingly using portals to cut costs and extend applications and data to mobile workers. Boston Medical Center is using a combination of NFuse Elite and Citrix's NFuse Classic application portal server to give hospital staff Web access to numerous clinical appli-cations and patient databases.

The initial focus is on delivering alerts and links to results; the long-term goal is one-click access to all data related to a particular patient, which now resides in multiple applications and databases, chief technology officer Darren Dworkin says.

AXA Financial Inc. has been extending its resources using Sun Microsystems' portal server technology. The New York financial-services provider is discovering that it can simplify IT management in the process.

AXA is using an extranet portal that supports a network of 7,500 advisers to deliver browser-based access to a suite of tools, including financial-planning applications and document-management services. In the process, the company is transitioning its advisers from a Windows 95 computing environment to a Web-based model.

The move will make it easier for AXA to ensure that its advisers can access the data they need and remove any compatibility issues when the company rolls out new applications and services."With the browser, you pretty much get divorced from those problems," says Dave Wollin, the company's managing director of emerging technologies.

Version 6 of the Sun One Portal Server, which Sun plans to release in August, will also give AXA more flexibility, he says. By year's end, it will support competing app servers from BEA Systems Inc. and IBM, as well as the Linux and Windows 2000 operating systems.