An Approach to Protect Electronic Health Records

A reliable medical image management must ensure proper safeguarding of the electronic health records. Safeguarding the medical information of the patients is a major concern in all hospitals. Digital watermarking is a technique popularly used to protect the confidentiality of medical information and maintaining them which enhances patient health awareness. In this paper, we propose a blend of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) for watermarking theEHR. The EHR is further encrypted using key-based encryption method for access control. The SVD is applied to the approximate and vertical coefficients of the wavelet transform. The technique improves EHR protection and facilitates in accounting for performance parameters like peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE). Additionally, the properties of gray-level co-occurrence matrix like normalized cross-correlation (NC), wavelet energies, and homogeneity between the pixel pairs of host and the encrypted watermarked EHR are exploited.