A single hospital can have as many as 200 different clinical, financial and other applications that its workers need to use. From the point of view of a healthcare worker - who may see 60 patient records a day - accessing multiple applications means toggling between them, logging in every time they do so.

This is an inefficient and time consuming process. As a result, many hospital staff find it easier to use one log-in and leave all systems open, so that any member of their team can access the information they need, immediately. This extremely common work-around is insecure and means that hospitals cannot track each individual's interaction with a patient, which is an information governance requirement.

Over the past one to two years, single sign-on has emerged as an effective way for hospitals to eliminate the challenges associated with multiple passwords, while improving clinician adoption of healthcare IT systems and overall patient and data security.

John Gobron, general manager at Sentillion says: "Independent studies have shown that the average time for healthcare workers to access applications is between 81-107 seconds. With single sign-on, a user can access multiple applications in as little as 7-12 seconds, saving valuable time."

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust have both addressed the dual challenge of easy access with strong security by deploying single sign-on. These organisations have also taken the extra step of implementing context management across their applications, to further simplify the way clinicians access critical applications and patient information.