Topic starter
25/06/2026 3:05 pm
TL;DR: UK healthcare facilities using shared-use mobile devices report average annual savings of £522,000, but 47% still lack a fully implemented policy and 77% say users share credentials, according to Imprivata’s 2025 State of Shared Mobile Devices in Healthcare Report. The core issue is not device adoption itself, but whether identity, sign-in, and offboarding controls can keep pace with shared clinical workflows.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Imprivata: “New Imprivata Report Finds that UK Hospitals Save More Than £522K Annually with Shared-Use Mobile Devices, but Gaps in Strategy Pose Risks”.
By the numbers:
- Nearly half of organisations, 47%, have not fully implemented a policy for managing shared-use mobile devices.
- Imprivata says 77% of respondents report that users share credentials when accessing shared-use mobile devices.
- Imprivata reports that 74% of respondents say shared-use mobile devices are frequently left signed in by staff after use.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when clinicians rely on shared logins or leave medical devices signed in to one user?
A: Shared logins and unattended sessions break accountability, data integrity, and access control.
Q: Why do shared clinical devices create identity and access risk?
A: Because the device is reused by multiple people across shifts, so the organisation must prove who had access, when the session ended, and whether the endpoint was reset.
Q: How should healthcare teams govern shared mobile device access without slowing clinicians down?
A: They should make authentication fast, device state visible, and session handoff explicit.
Practitioner guidance
- Define a shared-device identity policy Specify who can use each device class, how authentication occurs at handoff, and what state must be cleared before reassignment.
- Enforce per-user sign-in and sign-out Require unique authentication for every clinician and force session closure before the device is handed to the next user.
- Track device state and location continuously Link mobile device management records to active sessions so missing, uncharged, or misconfigured devices are visible before patient care is affected.
Bottom line: Shared-use mobile devices can deliver clear operational value in hospitals, but the security model fails when authentication and session control are left informal.
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25/06/2026 4:24 pm
Shared clinical devices expose an access-governance gap, not a device problem. The report is really about whether identity controls can keep pace with high-tempo care delivery. When organisations treat shared endpoints as a procurement decision instead of an access model, they inherit ambiguous authentication, weak session closure, and poor accountability. The practical conclusion is that the control plane matters more than the hardware.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When does shared-device convenience become an identity control failure?
A: It becomes a control failure when the organisation cannot tell who accessed the device, cannot prove the session ended, or cannot recover the device state after loss or handoff. At that point, convenience has overridden governance, and the shared endpoint is operating outside the intended trust model.
👉 Read our full editorial: Shared-use mobile devices expose healthcare identity gaps in UK hospitals