Watermarking patient photographs

As an old nursery rhyme tells it, one’s face is one’s fortune. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is its value in dollars and cents to your business?

A recent article in Techcrunch magazine cited a German security firm Greenbone Networks estimate that literally billions of medical images are currently exposed to theft from clinic and hospital servers.

In 2017, a notorious hacker group threatened to publicly release surgical images of celebrity patients at a London plastic surgery clinic, possibly to extract a ransom payment. The message here is that practices need to ensure their servers are protected with the highest level of security possible.

What however of the images published on clinic websites, digital guidebooks and social media? These are even more susceptible to misappropriation and outright theft. Many practices use pictures, with their patient’s consent, to demonstrate and advertise their services. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy for someone to simply lift those images and fraudulently present them as their own work. In 2020, a prominent Australian clinic discovered that their entire before and after patient gallery had been replicated by a practice in a foreign jurisdiction with minimal protections against theft of intellectual property.

The obvious solution is to include your clinic’s logo and name in all images, however it’s not quite as simple as dropping them in with standard photo apps. There are numerous algorithms around that can easily remove them or they may simply be cropped out, if not positioned strategically.

The best solution is watermarking, a process which embeds your name and logo so that they become an intrinsic part of the overall image. If you plan to do this with watermarking software, here are a few things you’ll need to consider:

• Ideally, avoid software that requires online image editing, as this increases the potential for pictures to be misappropriated. Upload any software onto your own system.
• Ensure any 3rd party provider is not using an internet-based solution. Avoid sending your images online or using file hosting services like Dropbox.
• How bold or discrete do you want the watermark to appear? It can be small or large, opaque or semi- transparent. Larger coverage and more opaque watermarks are more tamper-proof but may appear clumsy if not carefully designed.
• If you intend to include your business logo, ensure it has a transparent background in order to avoid an unattractive colour block in the image.
• Position watermarking in such a way that it can’t be simply cropped out, leaving the image still usable. You’ll also need to avoid obscuring any particular features that are intended to be highlighted in the photo. If the picture is a rhinoplasty procedure, you’ll want to ensure the nose is not covered.
• Choose colours that will subtly contrast against the background without appearing garish.
• No two images will be identical, so you’ll need to adjust watermark placement, size, colour and transparency to suit each picture.

If you’ll be presenting procedure images at seminars and conferences, remember to watermark them, as speaker presentations are often shared online by the event organiser.

Insight provides a bespoke, one-stop solution for patient image watermarking. AMP