A Secure Electronic Prescription System Using Steganography with Encryption Key Implementation

Over the years health care has seen major improvement due to the introduction information and communication technology with electronic medical prescription being one the areas benefiting from it. Within the overall context of protection of health care information, privacy of prescription data needs special treatment. This paper presents an eprescription system that addresses some challenges pertaining to the prescription privacy protection in the process of drug prescription. The developed system uses spread spectrum image steganography algorithm with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key implementation to provide a secure means of delivering medical prescription to the parties involved. The architecture for encoding and decoding was implemented with an electronic health record. The software development tools used were PHP and MySQL database management system for front end and backend data management respectively. The designed system demonstration shows that the synergistic combination of steganography and cryptography technologies in medical prescription is capable of providing a secure transmission to properly provide security for patient’s medical prescription. Keywords-prescription; eprescription, cryptography, steganography;AES and spread spectrum