A Watermarking Approach to Communicate Patient Data Securely from Distributed Sources

Hospitals or Health organizations collect data from patients and store it in databases. The data are scattered in different locations and significant to share from remote places for serving quality treatment and urgent decisions. Any data alternation while transmitting through the transmission channel may cause security issues like data integrity. Data integrity is essential because any alteration of data can hamper medical diagnoses by losing sensitive data. Watermarking could be a practical approach for ensuring such data security with a lower computational cost. Various strategies of watermarking were used to secure health data, especially images. However, watermarking for patient text data has been difficult due to the availability of the right techniques. Therefore, this paper introduces a new watermarking strategy to share patient text from distributed databases. We use the prescription data for testing the proposed system. The experimental results indicate that the method outperforms the existing method against intended attacks.