Now researches of ECG data compression mainly focus on compressing the ECG data of low sampling rate. A BW-based high sampling rate ECG data lossless compression algorithm is proposed in this paper. We apply difference operation to the original ECG data first and take part of the 16-bit binary differential value as 8-bit binary. Then the differential results are coded with the move-to-front coding method in order to make the same characters centralizing in a certain area. Last, we gain a high compression ratio by using the arithmetic coding method further. Our experimental results indicate that this is an efficient lossless compression method suitable for body surface ECG data as well as for heart ECG data. The average compression ratios come up to 3.547 and 3.608, respectively. By comparison with current ECG compression algorithms, our algorithm has gained much improvement in terms of the compression ratio, especially when applied to the high sampling rate ECG data.