Kárla-Orsolya Hegyi, LLM student in Health and Technology Law, k.hegyi student.rug.nl

The Groningen Centre for Health Law recently hosted an event during Women’s Week at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen with Dr Marco Versluis, gynaecologist at the UMCG, and Dr Geranne Lautenbach, legal advisor at Hooghiemstra & Partners. Following the event, both speakers were interviewed to offer further insights to current and future students of the Health and Technology Law LLM track.

Health and technology law in everyday practice

What kinds of health and technology law questions do you encounter in your daily practice – can you give a recent example?

Dr Lautenbach: The availability of good technology solutions is a major issue for healthcare practitioners. One key example is the eIDAS Regulation, which requires confidentiality standards for logging into electronic health data. At present, there are too few login options for healthcare practitioners that meet sufficiently high confidentiality standards — and that is something the government needs to address. If the regulation was properly implemented, login methods would be interoperable and standardised, potentially supporting single sign-on. It should make things easier and more trustworthy, not harder.

Dr Versluis: As a doctor, I sometimes use an app on my phone to prepare for consultations or look things up. It is a genuine benefit, but it also brings safety challenges: who could access patient data through it? When I have to complete a three-step authentication process that then fails, it takes both effectiveness and enjoyment out of my work. I encounter these challenges on a daily basis. On the positive side, our electronic patient file system traces access: if I were to log on to a patient’s data without a clinical reason, that access is recorded. I don’t even notice the tracing happening, but I think that’s one of the genuinely good things about the system.

Why combining health and technology law matters

What is the added value of professionals who combine expertise in both health and technology law, rather than specialising in just one?

Dr Lautenbach: If you want to use health tech in healthcare, you need to understand both sides. Healthcare practitioners don't need to become privacy lawyers, but they do need to consider the confidentiality of the information they process. And for me, as a legal advisor specialised in digital solutions for healthcare, I need to understand both healthcare as well as IT law enough to be able to advise appropriately.

Dr Versluis: Law and medicine cannot be viewed as entirely separate disciplines. They need to overlap. It can't be that only a small group knows a little about both, because within each discipline, every practitioner is confronted daily by things that touch on law and regulation. Interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial if we are to make progress.

Looking back, looking forward

What is one thing you wish you had known before entering your field? How do you think an LLM in Health and Technology Law could help students better prepare for it?

Dr Versluis: Much of medical training focuses on knowledge, under the assumption that if you know enough, you can solve everything. What I would have liked to know earlier is that dealing with patients, navigating daily challenges, and interpreting data critically matter far more than memorising facts. This will only become more important as AI systems produce all kinds of outputs, including hallucinations. We need to encourage students to become critical thinkers: to question, reflect, and act with awareness. Being a professional is all about critical action and reflection.

Dr Lautenbach: My advice would be: don't be scared of technology, and don't try to return to a paper-based world because you cannot turn back time. AI may not be perfect yet, but it is evolving and will keep getting stronger. We need to learn how to work with it carefully, identifying issues as they arise. My suggestion is to find a good middle road: not analogue, but also not uncritical of the digital revolution.

Dr Versluis: Embrace the digital shift, but be thoughtful about which tools you commit to. Act consciously, and embrace the messiness and contestedness that comes with it.