The smart healthcare system is an electronic patient records (EPR) sharing system, which significantly helps sharing of EPR data and provides appropriate medical assistance for the patients and a more suitable platform for the potential researchers. However, the security of EPR data is still a major issue in such systems. In this paper, we develop a compression-then-encryption-based dual watermarking to protect the EPR data for the healthcare system, which produces several significant features. Experiments conducted on a large set of medical data indicate the capability of our proposed method for smart healthcare. Finally, when compared with the existing technique, the proposed work offers better performance in terms of robustness and security. © 1994-2012 IEEE.