Aiming at the problem that the visual quality of the decrypted image is low in the existing reversible data hiding methods for the encrypted medical image, a reversible data hiding method in encrypted domain based on the difference histogram shift was proposed. Firstly, to ensure that the private content of the medical image was not leaked, the sender using an encryption algorithm with the property of homomorphic ciphertext comparison encrypted the original medical image. Then, on the data-hider side, the difference histogram of the received encrypted image was calculated using the homomorphic property, and the secret data was embedded in the encrypted image by shifting the difference histogram. In order to obtain a high embedding rate, the data-hider could conduct multiple rounds of data embedding in the encrypted image. Finally, according to the type of the keys possessed, the receiver could perform data extraction, image decryption and image recovery for the received encrypted image containing embedded data. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the visual quality of the decrypted medical image, and has high embedding rate and security.