Digital Health Must Start with Clinician Input, According to Imprivata Nursing Expert
Digital transformation in healthcare will fail without early and active clinician involvement, according to Daniel Johnston, MRes, RN, Associate Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Imprivata and a practicing nurse with over two decades of experience in the UK and US.
In an interview with Healthcare IT News, Johnston emphasized that clinicians must be embedded in every phase of digital health projects—from procurement and discovery to deployment and training—to ensure usability, adoption, and optimal care at the bedside.
“Clinicians are generally not sufficiently engaged early in the process of designing and deploying health IT, when in reality, an effective deployment starts with engaging clinicians during procurement,” he said. “Clinician inclusion in procurement enables problems to be identified and clinical success to be defined at the outset.”
As healthcare organizations worldwide accelerate digital transformation efforts, it’s essential for frontline clinician perspective to be incorporated into health IT design and deployment. Too often, tools are introduced without clinical input, resulting in security friction and reduced technology adoption—creating frustration and taking clinician’s time and focus away from providing patient care.
Johnston advocates for working alongside clinicians throughout the procurement and implementation process to ensure secure access management technologies like passwordless authentication and mobile access management reflect real-world clinical demands.
“The inclusion of clinicians' frontline insights in the procurement, discovery, design, testing and clinical change management using health IT is crucial to consistently deploy safely and achieve good adoption of health IT,” said Johnston. One example of this principle in action is the approach taken by Victorian Heart Hospital in Australia, which doubled time savings for staff by streamlining mobile access using Zebra TC52 devices and clinician-informed identity workflows.
As the industry moves toward innovations like biometric patient identification and passwordless authentication, Johnston underscores that success will hinge on aligning digital tools with the realities of frontline care. Without that alignment, the promise of transformation risks falling flat.