This paper presents a novel coding scheme for electrocardiogram (ECG). Following beat delineation, the periods of the beats are normalized by multirate processing. After amplitude normalization, discrete wavelet transform is applied to each beat. Due to the period and amplitude normalization, the wavelet transform coefficients bear a high correlation across beats at identical locations. To increase the compression ratio, the residual sequence obtained after linear prediction of the significant wavelet coefficients is transmitted to the decoder. The difference between the actual period and the mean beat period, and that between the actual scale factor and the average amplitude scale factor are also transmitted for each beat. At the decoder, the inverse wavelet transform is computed from the reconstructed wavelet transform coefficients. The original amplitude and period of each beat are then recovered. The approximation achieved, at an average rate of 180 b/s, is of high quality. We have evaluated the normalized maximum amplitude error and its position in each cycle, in addition to the normalized root mean square error. The significant feature of the proposed technique is that, while the error is nearly uniform throughout the cycle, the diagnostically crucial QRS region is kept free of maximal reconstruction error.