Healthcare IT teams have struggled to balance cybersecurity compliance and clinical efficiency. Each new digital system required for care delivery, like electronic health records (EHRs), prescription services, lab portals, etc., adds another login to a busy clinician’s workflow.

As healthcare accelerates digital transformation efforts, leaders are confronting a critical balancing act: advancing innovation while fortifying defences against growing cyber threats. According to the 2024 Digital Health Most Wired report, IT budget allocations for digital initiatives nearly doubled from 4.8% to 9.7% year over year. This indicates that digital transformation is now essential to care delivery.

Passwords continue to slow down productivity in fast-paced workflows. In addition to creating inefficiencies, they are also known to be less secure than other authentication methods. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, 90% of successful cyberattacks and 70% of data breaches originate at endpoint devices.

Imprivata Connect 2025 London (formerly HealthCon) took place at the St Martin’s Lane Hotel, Covent Garden, London, on 6 November. It was a busy, vibrant day, hosted by our CEO Fran Rosch, with our customers, guests and the Imprivata team sharing experiences and learnings. One key theme that was repeated again and again by various speakers was the imperative to make life easier for clinicians – to remove some of the cognitive burden, making technology easy and seamless to use. Keep the clinicians happy, and everyone else is happy too, to the ultimate benefit of patients.

George A. Gellert MD, MPH, MPA, is an epidemiologist focused on using information technology to improve public health outcomes. In this blog he discusses the findings from his recent research collaboration with Imprivata, just published in the peer reviewed journal Advances in Health Information Science and Practice (AHISP), the official journal of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), on the impact and value of single sign-on and access management in hospitals in the UK and Ireland.

Cybersecurity in UK healthcare is under mounting pressure. As more embrace digital transformation, relying on more vendors, contractors, and interconnected devices, the risk of cyberattacks and breaches increases. Attacks like the 2024 Synnovis cyberattack, which disrupted over 11,000 NHS appointments and procedures and cost an estimated £32.7 million, reveal the implications of increasing threats in this changing landscape.

Shared-use mobile devices have become indispensable tools in NHS wards, enabling faster communication, streamlined workflows, and more responsive patient care. Yet Imprivata research exposes a striking dual reality: while UK hospitals save an average of £522,000 annually by using shared-use devices instead of personal ones, 47% still lack a formal management policy, leaving critical security and operational gaps that threaten to undermine these gains.