This paper presents a secure and authentic transmission scheme for electronic patient records. The goal of the proposed scheme is to improve the performance of another scheme proposed by Chao et al., based on the concept of data hiding. In their scheme, the electronic patient records are embedded into a cover image using bipolar tolerant error range multiple-based number conversion. A key chain is generated that is used to record the total number of base numbers used in the embedding procedure. In fact, the key chain not only consumes the hiding capacity, but also lowers security when it is embedded into the cover image. The proposed scheme improves the multiple-based number conversion by using two-based number conversion. The key chain is omitted in the proposed scheme. In addition, the magnitudes of 1 in the tolerant error range are fully used to improve the hiding capacity. Furthermore, all types of embedding data are processed in the same way. The experimental results show the validity of the proposed scheme and also demonstrate that redundant data are reduced and more hiding capacity can be achieved.
