How to burn Windows readable encrypted disk images or PDFs ?

[mainemini]

Our medical office has several Macs including a rarely used Windows VM via VMWare Fusion on one machine and a couple of chromebooks. We prefer to do most of our work on the Macs.

We need to send large PDFs of medical records from our online EMR to other offices occasionally. If these are misplaced or not disposed of properly, then we have major HIPAA (govt. regulation) headaches if they were not encrypted. HIPAA is vague but "strong" encryption is the most common recommendation.

It's not clear how secure the simple PDF encrypting option is in Preview.

Putting the PDF(s) in a folder and creating an encrypted disk image can be done with 128AES or 256AES encryption but when I do this following various guides to make an ISO image instead of a DMG, the encrypted image can't be read on several Windows machines we tried. Most other medical offices only use Windows.

Is Preview encryption "strong"?

Can Preview create Windows readable encrypted ISO images?

Is there an easier way or app that I'm not considering?

Thanks

 

[cdcastillo]

I use PDF pen for Mac, from smile software. When saving a PDF, they offer 3 levels of encryption: Weak, Strong, and Strongest (least compatible). I think this app would do nicely for your office needs.