AI expert

Charlotte Tschider discusses legal questions around AI and healthcare law

Associate Professor Charlotte Tschider moved to academia after nearly two decades of work in cybersecurity, privacy, IT, and legal compliance. Now, she uses her experience to help students approach the ever-evolving legal questions around AI and healthcare law.

You’ve been a professor at Loyola for four years now. What has changed in the legal field in that time?

In my area of expertise, artificial intelligence has exploded—not just in the healthcare space, but pretty much everywhere.

An example is in information privacy law. Artificial intelligence is fed by tremendous amounts of data, often identifiable information about a person. That data could have been purchased from other entities, from data brokers; it could have been collected from an individual, and that person may not know that that data is being used to create AI.

If you’re a company that has this huge data set that all the engineers are really excited about, if you’re a lawyer for that organization, you need to ask the right questions to figure out how they’re using the data, where it came from, and where it’s being stored.

What do your students learn about artificial intelligence?

Everybody knows generally what AI is, but to know how to regulate it, you need to understand how it works, especially if you’re making policy recommendations. So, I often try to teach them the technology—just the basics. If you understand the basics, you can have a conversation with somebody who’s creating this technology and ask them the kinds of questions that are going to help you understand: are we running afoul of any current laws?

How does Loyola set itself apart in teaching about AI, law, and privacy?

This fall I’m teaching health information privacy and cyber security, and in that class, I talk about the implications of healthcare AI on both of those topics.

What makes the classes unique is that we’re trying to blend things together to show how they connect, that these aren’t discrete areas of the law. Health care is not just health care. AI is not just AI. Cybersecurity is not just cybersecurity, privacy is not just privacy, and intellectual property is not just intellectual property. All of those things are kind of intermingling with a lot of these newer technologies. There are some really interesting threads that connect all of them, and we’re connecting those discrete subjects with these broader policy implications.

“Everybody knows generally what AI is, but to know how to regulate it, you need to understand how it works.”

Will this area of study be a burgeoning area of the employment market?

I tell my students that if you know this stuff, you become the go-to person within your law firm or organization. If you know something about it, you become very desirable, because a lot of people who are currently working in that world don’t understand the details of it, how the technology works, or even the policy implications. –Andy Vasoyan (May 2024)

Check out Tschider’s research.