The 2025 Imprivata State of Shared Mobile Devices in Healthcare Report reveals both opportunity and challenges for UK healthcare organisations to better leverage shared-use mobile devices in the delivery of patient care
LONDON, Sept. 16, 2025, a leading provider of access management solutions for healthcare and other mission-critical industries, today released new researchwhich finds that each UK healthcare facility saves an average of £522,000 annually by using shared-use mobile devices versus dedicated personal devices for clinical staff. Most survey respondents (85%) agree that mobile devices are essential clinical tools, however, nearly half (47%) of organisations have not fully implemented a policy for managing shared-use mobile devices, resulting in security, operational, device management, and user experience challenges.
The "2025 State of Shared Mobile Devices in Healthcare Report" provides a comprehensive view of how hospitals and healthcare systems in the UK, Australia, Canada, and the US are using mobile devices in clinical care-and where gaps in governance, workflow, and policy are limiting success. Research conducted by Vanson Bourne, which includes responses from 125 clinical and IT leaders across healthcare delivery organisations in the UK, reveals both the potential and the risks of using shared mobile devices in care delivery.
"Shared-use mobile devices represent one of the biggest opportunities to streamline workflows, save time, and improve patient care. Harnessing the power of shared mobile devices and ensuring rapid adoption amongst the clinical workforce will be driving how technology aligns with the needs of patients and clinicians alike to realise the NHS 10 year plan's ambition of ensuring an NHS fit for the future," said Daniel Johnston, associate chief nursing informatics officer and director of clinical operations at Imprivata. "However, achieving these benefits requires effective device management, and this research reveals what we see at many organisations - clinical and IT staff alike recognise the tremendous value in using mobile devices to enhance the delivery of care, but they have not yet unlocked how to best optimise at scale."
The benefits of shared-use mobile devices
Mobile technology is now considered foundational to UK healthcare, and nearly all (98%) of survey respondents expect the use of shared mobile devices to increase in the next two years. The primary clinical benefits of shared-use mobile devices include increased coordination and communication between clinical staff (as cited by 67% of respondents), standardisation of workflows across teams (56%), increased mobility/flexibility (56%).
A shared-use device model for clinical staff also results in IT benefits, including greater visibility into mobile?device usage and accountability (according to 69% of respondents), improved asset management in locating lost mobile?devices (65%), and increased alignment with regulations/compliance (65%).
In addition, 85% of respondents think shared-use mobile devices deliver a greater ROI than individual-use or BYOD devices, resulting in an average annual savings of £522,000 per UK healthcare facility. However, this is below the global average of £840,000 annually, suggesting UK organisations have the chance to better optimise their device utilisation and drive greater ROI.
Operational, security, workflow limitations
Despite the benefits of shared devices, many challenges exist for both clinical staff and IT teams. These include concerns around data security (according to 47% of respondents), inconsistent configuration (44%) and lack of a reliable way to track mobile devices (40%).
For clinical staff, workflow challenges include getting locked out of mobile devices (as experienced to some extent by 84% of respondents), dealing with broken, uncharged, and/or misconfigured devices (86%) and missing or unavailable devices (84%).
These challenges result in potentially significant security gaps, with 77% of respondents stating that users share credentials when accessing shared-use mobile devices, and 74% revealing that shared-use mobile devices are frequently left signed in by staff after use. As a result, 55% are not completely confident that patient data is fully protected on shared-use mobile devices.
In addition, despite the device tracking advantages of a shared-use model, facilities still lose about 13% of their mobile devices annually (or about 28 devices per facility per year), largely due to the lack of an implemented policy. This has significant security and operational impact, including risk to patient data security, delay to communication, reduced production and increased staff frustration (all of which are cited by 48% of respondents).
"The challenges that organisations face in managing and securing shared-use devices are not surprising given that the industry is at the early stages of adoption," added Johnston. "To address these challenges and start to optimise the use of mobile devices in patient care, UK healthcare organisations must implement strong identity and access management, more robust device management, and strategies to streamline clinical workflows to deliver the highest standards of security and usability."
Download the 2025 State of Shared Mobile Devices in Healthcare Report.
Methodology
For this global report, researchers surveyed 400 leaders from acute care facilities with 100+ beds across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The respondent pool consisted of 242 IT decision makers and 158 clinical leaders (including 125 respondents from the UK). Survey objectives included assessing current adoption and usage of shared-use mobile devices, exploring benefits across clinical, operational, and security domains, and identifying key challenges and barriers to effective implementation of shared-use mobile devices.
About Imprivata?
Imprivata delivers simple and secure access management solutions for healthcare and other mission-critical industries to ensure every second of crucial work is both frictionless and secure. Imprivata's platform of innovative, interoperable access management and privileged access security solutions enable organisations to fully manage and secure all enterprise and third-party identities to facilitate seamless user access, protect against internal and external security threats, and reduce total cost of ownership. For more information, visit www.imprivata.com/uk.
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