Hospitals face a unique identity security challenge. Unlike corporate spaces, where employees log in once and work from a single device, clinicians are rarely in one place for long, moving rapidly between shared workstations, clean rooms, and bedside terminals. Every session requires authentication, often with long, complex passwords or authentication methods that don’t align with clinical workflows.
The result? Frustration, burnout, and an increased risk of security lapses. In fact, studies show clinicians can lose up to 122 hours annually just accessing the systems they need to deliver care—nearly three weeks of productivity lost to passwords and repeated logins (Ponemon Institute via Imprivata).
This blog explores why authentication remains such a challenge in healthcare, how that impacts both clinicians and patients, and why hospitals need a new approach built for shared workstations.
Shared Workstations and Identity Drift
Healthcare is one of the few industries where shared workstations are the norm. Nurses, physicians, and specialists rotate through the same terminals throughout the day. Unlike an assigned device in an office or personal laptop, these workstations don’t belong to any one person, which makes identity assurance difficult.
Traditional authentication methods—passwords, PINs, swipe cards, tokens—were not designed for these settings. They assume each device has a single user. But in hospitals, one workstation will see dozens of unique users in a single shift.
This creates two critical problems:
The paradox is clear: the more hospitals try to strengthen authentication, the more friction they introduce and the more likely clinicians are to explore workarounds.
Authentication is not just an IT inconvenience; it’s a driver of clinical burnout.
The American Hospital Association reported that physician burnout rates remain alarmingly high, with the most recent study from 2023 showing 48.2% of clinicians experiencing burnout, even after slight improvements from prior years (AHA). Burnout has many causes — staffing shortages, administrative burden, and EHR demands — but authentication plays a measurable role.
Every login adds friction to workflows. Clinicians, already under pressure, often describe it as “death by a thousand clicks.” In May of 2017, Drs. John Levinson, Bruce H. Price and Vikas Saini published an article detailing the daily challenges of accessing EHR. “Dr. Jones” a pseudonym for a physician, is the primary subject of the piece, who details how over the course of a single day, they had 24 scheduled appointments, which required 16 hours and 2,541 clicks. Multiply dozens of logins per shift by hundreds of staff members, and the authentication burden becomes systemic.
Research consistently ties EHR-related administrative tasks to burnout (Wikipedia summary of peer-reviewed studies). Authentication is one of the most visible and frustrating variables in a clinician's workday.
Burnout isn’t just about morale, though; it directly impacts care. Studies show burned-out clinicians are more likely to make errors, reduce patient interaction time, and leave their roles prematurely, exacerbating staffing shortages.
While clinicians feel security friction, IT sees a different risk: credentials. Passwords remain the weakest link in hospital cybersecurity.
The 2024 Ponemon Healthcare Cybersecurity Report highlights that credential misuse remains a leading cause of breaches in healthcare, even as organizations adopt MFA and other controls (Proofpoint). Attackers target hospitals specifically because they know credential-based access is both overused and under-defended. This, of course, is in addition to insider threat, fraud, or someone simply accessing an unhashed password stored by the hospital's Pass-Through Authentication (PTA).
Hospitals can’t ignore the stakes. This sector is one of the most frequently targeted by threat actors. Breaches not only compromise sensitive patient data but also impact hospital operations, leading to care delays or diversions.
Authentication is at the center of this vulnerability. Password sharing, sticky notes, and insecure session handling all increase the likelihood of credential theft or misuse.
For many executives, authentication feels like an IT function, but the impact of weak identity controls extends directly to patients.
A study of U.S. hospitals found that data breaches correlated with a statistically significant increase in 30-day heart attack mortality rates. Post-breach, hospitals saw a decline in care quality equivalent to losing a year’s worth of medical progress in reducing those rates (University of Colorado study via arXiv).
This shows that authentication and identity security are not just compliance concerns. When breaches occur, the fallout is significant, including slow systems, disrupted care, and eroded trust; patient outcomes are directly affected by the hospital's identity security.
Hospitals have tried several strategies to reduce authentication burden, but each has limitations:
These tools may check boxes for compliance, but they fail to solve the dual challenge: maintaining strong identity and access security without disrupting care delivery.
This is where Continuous Authentication comes in.
Unlike most common solutions, Continuous Authentication doesn’t rely on a single point-in-time login. Instead, it continuously verifies a user’s identity throughout a session by analyzing behavioral biometrics like typing cadence, mouse dynamics, and interaction patterns.
For hospitals, this has three transformative benefits:
Twosenses Continuous Authentication and Continuous Access Evaluation platform is powerful in shared workstation environments. It adapts to the unique challenges of hospital IT, rather than forcing clinical workflows to bend around outdated authentication methods.
The broader healthcare industry is already moving toward passwordless strategies. But as many CIOs and CISOs know, hospital-wide passwordless rollouts often fail. Shared workstations are where most solutions break down.
Continuous Authentication solves the missing piece. It makes passwordless access viable in environments where dozens of staff share the same devices and mobile MFA isn’t practical. Instead of replaying stored credentials or extending trust based on an initial login, Twosense uses behavioral biometrics as an active authentication factor. Typing rhythm, keystroke cadence, and mouse movement form a live, session-based biometric signature, something unique to each individual and impossible to share, steal, or replicate. This topic will be discussed more extensively in part 2 next week.
By automating identity verification in the background, Continuous Authentication eliminates the tradeoff between compliance, security, and clinician usability.
Hospitals face an impossible bind: authentication controls are necessary for compliance and security, but they introduce friction that drives burnout and unsafe workarounds. Clinicians lose weeks each year to logging in, and hospitals remain exposed to breaches that measurably harm patient outcomes.
Traditional tools like SSO, tokens, or mobile MFA fall short in shared workstation environments. Continuous Authentication offers a different path — fully passwordless, behavioral biometric-based, and seamless for clinicians.
For healthcare leaders, the lesson is clear: authentication can’t remain a bottleneck. It must evolve into an invisible safeguard that strengthens security while allowing clinicians to stay focused on what matters most — patients.