Authentication Issues Cost Frontline Organizations Thousands of Working Hours Each Year According to Research from Imprivata and FIDO Alliance

Survey of 700 IT and security leaders reveals delayed patient care, widespread security workarounds and concern over AI-enabled impersonation

WALTHAM, Mass., October 19, 2026--Authentication problems for frontline workers are delaying patient care, production and deliveries across industries, according to Frontline Friction: The State of Authentication for Frontline Workers [https://www.imprivata.com/resources/ebooks/frontline-friction-state-authentication-frontline-workers], a new report from Imprivata, a leading provider of access management solutions for healthcare and other mission-critical industries, and the FIDO Alliance. The survey of 700 IT and security decision-makers responsible for worker authentication, at healthcare, manufacturing and other frontline-intensive organizations in the US, UK, France and Germany, finds that 34% (rising to 40% in healthcare) report authentication difficulties delaying patient care, production, delivery and/or other frontline work.

The complexity of frontline environments create authentication challenges that result in friction for users. These include delays switching between users on shared devices, password resets and lockouts, connectivity failures, and repeated MFA prompts.

As a result, the scale and impact of authentication issues is substantial. 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.

Workarounds compound risk in environments that are already complex

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.

"It's easy to underestimate the impact of a few extra authentication steps, but when those interruptions happen repeatedly across thousands of frontline workers, the cost adds up quickly. And the consequences go beyond lost time. When security controls don't match the way people work, they unintentionally create incentives to bypass them," said Joel Burleson-Davis, chief technology & security officer at Imprivata. "We should be using modern identity and access approaches to remove workflow friction while strengthening our confidence that only appropriate access is getting through to critical systems. That's how we make both the workforce and the organization more secure."