Securing digital transformation in healthcare: Insights from Imprivata’s Joel Burleson-Davis

Balancing innovation & security? Imprivata CTO on how to build a secure digital foundation and reduce friction for clinicians.

By admin

Sep 2, 2025, 8:57 AM

As healthcare leaders double down on digital transformation, they face competing imperatives: the need to innovate at speed and the equally urgent need to secure an expanding threat landscape. Technology needs to be smarter and more secure, but it also must be seamless. For clinicians on the front lines, every second counts, and every barrier between them and the data they need can feel like a digital roadblock.

That’s why identity is emerging as one of the most strategic layers of healthcare’s digital fabric.

In this Health Stealth Radio conversation, Frank Cutitta sat down with Joel Burleson-Davis, CTO of access management leader Imprivata, to explore how digital identity is helping organizations reduce friction, enhance security, and unlock clinical and operational gains. The conversation aligned well with CHIME’s 2024 Digital Health Most Wired findings: average IT budget allocations for digital initiatives jumped from 4.8% to 9.7% year over year—a clear signal that transformation has become mission-critical.

Section Index:

From buzzword to bedrock: Redefining digital transformation

“We all use the term ‘digital transformation,’” said Cutitta. “It’s one of the words I enjoy the most — and one I hate the most — because it just doesn’t have a clear meaning.”

Burleson-Davis agrees. At Imprivata, digital transformation isn’t about flashy tools; it’s about solving real-world challenges that healthcare organizations face every day. Imprivata’s long-term vision centers on what Burleson-Davis described as “chasing two ends,” driven by two key realities shared by CMIOs, CISOs, CIOs, and frontline leaders.

“On one hand, you have an ever-escalating threat environment — there are more and more ransomware gangs and hacks and all sorts of things taking people down,” he said. “That’s only getting … more severe, harder to deal with.” To keep up, many organizations escalate their security controls.

“In many paradigms,” he added, “that ends up being a burden to the user.”

Imprivata’s answer lies in digital identity and specifically, access management. Burleson-Davis pointed to passwordless authentication — like facial recognition — as a way to reduce friction for clinicians while still strengthening cybersecurity.

Additionally, recent DHMW findings reinforce that digital transformation in healthcare is not just a buzzword. Organizations are seeing measurable gains in clinical and operational efficiency, enhanced patient care, stronger cybersecurity, and cost savings—all outcomes tied directly to their digital identity and access strategies.

Reducing toil, not just risk

Cutitta described the friction many clinicians face when juggling security protocols and patient care: “Technology gets in the way of clinicians, especially as it relates to security-type aspects.”

In the DHMW survey, healthcare organizations ranked “clinical quality and safety” as the second-highest priority segment for digital transformation, underscoring the critical need to reduce barriers to safe, efficient care delivery.

Burleson-Davis provided concrete examples of how technology is addressing the “two ends” of security and clinical burden. at Emory, Imprivata helped support a fully Apple-based care facility by collaborating with Apple and Epic to build a tightly integrated clinical experience. This included a welcomed tap-and-go capability for Macs where clinicians simply tap a proximity badge to access workstations and applications instead of manually entering usernames and passwords each time, which is tedious, frustrating, and takes time and focus away from patient care. Other Imprivata pilots use facial biometrics to simplify patient registration. It reduces duplicate IDs and gets patients into the system faster, he explained. He singled out the pilot with UMass Memorial Health as “a really great success story” — a pure partnership through implementation resulting in “nothing but sort of happiness from all sides”.

The same philosophy shapes Imprivata’s approach to shared mobile devices. These tools are increasingly common in clinical workflows, yet they introduce risk without the right safeguards. Imprivata’s mobile solutions support time savings, strong security, and smooth transitions between users.

The company also helps healthcare organizations use operational data to reduce inefficiencies and ease administrative burden. Burleson-Davis noted that Imprivata gathers insights about how health systems operate—at both the infrastructure and application levels—to improve performance and reduce unnecessary toil.

For example, organizations can analyze how specific clinical-use workstations are used: which ones are busy, which are idle, and where bottlenecks occur. For example, there might be a particular hotspot where many different nurses are using a single workstation, while other workstations may be sitting unused in low-traffic areas, he noted.

Beyond basic location tracking, Imprivata offers visibility into what’s happening within those workstations and clinical apps. If one unit shows users typing passwords a hundred times a day while another unit shows none, that discrepancy can point to a configuration or access issue. “You can get early signs that you’re pushing some of that burden … unknowingly … to groups,” he explained. “And [we] help optimize that and pull that back off.”

Imprivata measures ROI not in abstract metrics, but in seconds. “We actually have a clinical workflow team, and they will go … through workflows … with stopwatches,” said Burleson-Davis, noting how input times are valuable insights into those workflows and end-user experiences. “Per shift, someone might enter a password 100 times; every time, that takes three or four seconds.” Imprivata solutions automate and significantly reduce this login time, and when applied across thousands of staff, positively impacts cost management and reduces user burnout.

That same philosophy and approach shapes Imprivata’s approach to shared mobile devices, including shared devices. DHMW found 98% of providers have adopted mobile point-of-care (POC) and 97% have adopted mobile virtual Reality (VR). These mobile tools are increasingly common in clinical workflows, yet they introduce security and operational risks without the right safeguards. Imprivata’s mobile solutions support time savings, strong security, and smooth transitions between users. This improves overall clinical efficiency gains when it comes to using shared devices.

AI and the art of making tech work for humans

When it comes to AI, Burleson-Davis sees it as a powerful enabler that is sparking rapid change, but it’s not a magic bullet. “When we do look at what’s going to happen over the next three years, and we think about the pace of change that we’re accustomed to, it will probably speed up,” he predicted. “If you really look back at the last 10 years or 20 years, the pace of change has been ever increasing anyway. So, to me, that’s not a lot of new information. It’s like the patient change will become more rapid, but it’s been escalating for a long time.”

Burleson-Davis focuses on how AI-powered tools help translate complex information into useful, understandable insights for people across the healthcare enterprise.

“One of the most powerful things it’s doing is making complex, maybe verbose information a lot more approachable,” he said. There is a ton of data out there that is valuable but due to volume or medical jargon is not tailored for or is unapproachable to user groups like IT or privacy officers. This is where large language models (LLMs) can shine, he reasoned.

Whether privacy officers are trying to detect inappropriate access or patients are struggling to make sense of their medical records, AI can make large volumes of jargon-heavy content more digestible and actionable. And by integrating prompt engineering directly into Imprivata’s products, the company ensures that users don’t need to be AI experts to benefit from these tools.

“Everybody just thinks you just type something into ChatGPT and you get what you want,” Cutitta noted. “It’s not really the first question; it’s the fifth and seventh question where you’re refining that to get it to the digestible content or the contextual content.”

Burleson-Davis confirmed, “We are going to do the majority of that prompt engineering.” This way, those knowledge bases will be there because while ChatGPT is fine for personal use, “when you really think about enterprise products, [we] don’t want to shift that burden to those end users.”

Getting ahead of the threat: A smarter security posture

Security was the top priority for digital transformation in the recent DHMW survey, with 99% of organizations considering it “essential” or “high priority”.

When asked about the most common source of healthcare breaches, Burleson-Davis didn’t hesitate: “Third party access is the number one reason that people are getting hacked. It’s actually been for 20 years.” As hospitals become more reliant on vendors and service providers, managing that access becomes both more critical and more complex.

Imprivata addresses this by focusing on securing third-party access, which helps to remove a huge piece of the attack surface. The company also provides options for authentication and builds “hierarchical confidence levels” to balance security with user experience. This allows for a range of authentication methods, from a badge tap at a kiosk to more stringent requirements like facial biometrics and MFA in high-security areas. Nearly all organizations now require MFA for remote access to critical applications, and over 80% use it for internal systems.

The goal is to balance strong security with minimal user friction. Burleson-Davis said this means “being able to leverage the same system that is workflow aware and criticality aware so that you can do that to reduce friction as much as you can, whenever it makes sense.”

What comes next: Identity and access as infrastructure

Healthcare technology will continue to evolve, but the goals remain consistent: to make care more secure, more efficient, and more human-centered. As Burleson-Davis explained, identity is no longer a feature. It’s infrastructure. Digital identity and access management enables frictionless experiences for clinicians while improving security posture for IT. It streamlines care, supports mobile workflows, and adapts to new innovations like AI—without placing more burden on users. Imprivata is playing a role in shaping a more secure and efficient future. Although organizations have embraced technology to enhance the patient experience and have evolved their governance policies to meet security and “BYOD” expectations, there are still opportunities for further digital transformation in areas like data exchange and governance.

In a world where digital transformation keeps accelerating, identity and access solutions offer a foundation that hospitals can build on with confidence.

About Imprivata

Imprivata is the digital identity company for life- and mission-critical industries, redefining how organizations solve complex workflow, security, and compliance challenges with solutions that protect critical data and applications without workflow disruption. Its platform of interoperable identity, authentication, and access management solutions enable organizations in over 45 countries to fully manage and secure all enterprise and third-party digital identities by establishing trust between people, technology, and information. For more information, visit www.imprivata.com.