Healthcare Workers Claim Authentication Errors Delay Patient Care
According to a report from Imprivata, problems with authentication are delaying patient care within healthcare organizations. Organizations estimate that 37% of their frontline workers experience an authentication issue in a typical month. Each affected worker is interrupted around 11 times and loses an average of 2.5 hours of working time a month. For an average organization in this survey with around 2,800 frontline workers, it adds up to 32,400 working hours lost annually.
Nearly all organizations (95%) have observed frontline workers using workarounds because of authentication difficulties: staying logged in to avoid re-authentication (40%), attempting to bypass multi-factor authentication or other controls (36%) and sharing credentials (33%). The result is an accountability gap: only 40% of decision-makers are very confident that frontline access can be attributed to the correct individual.
These workarounds add risk to environments that attackers are already probing with AI. Fifty-seven percent of organizations report confirmed or suspected AI-assisted or deepfake employee impersonation in the past 12 months, with 23% confirming an incident. That sits alongside 62% reporting a confirmed or suspected unauthorized account-recovery, password-reset or unlock attempt, and 60% reporting social-engineering attempts targeting the service desk. This new reality is also reflected in how concerned frontline organizations are: 48% are very or extremely concerned about AI-enabled impersonation, the same proportion as for conventional social engineering.
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