Overview

Google, IBM & Meta Certificates – 40% Off

One Coursera Plus subscription covers most Professional Certificates on Coursera.

This course equips you with critical skills to work safely and effectively with generative AI in healthcare. Through realistic scenario-based learning, you'll master effective prompting strategies, evaluate AI outputs for bias and hallucinations, and crucially, learn when to trust AI and when human judgment must override it. Whether you're a healthcare student, clinician, manager, or policy professional, you'll discover how to harness AI as a tool for better decision-making without surrendering clinical expertise or ethical responsibility. Using concrete scenarios in clinical planning, resource allocation, and risk assessment, you'll explore the principles behind different AI tools and recognise their limitations in complex, real-world healthcare contexts. What makes this course unique is its focus on hybrid human-AI decision-making. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for human judgment, you'll learn to design safer, more equitable workflows that combine AI's analytical power with human insight, accountability, and ethical reasoning. You'll also examine emerging issues: data privacy, AI washing, representation gaps, and responsible use across global contexts. By course completion, you'll have practical frameworks for evaluating AI systems critically and the confidence to advocate for responsible, human-centred AI adoption in healthcare. Why take this course now? Globally, nearly half of clinicians reported using AI for work-related purposes in 2025, with adoption rates in some specialities exceeding 60 per cent in the United States. This rapid adoption means healthcare professionals urgently need critical frameworks to evaluate, oversee, and ethically integrate AI into their practice. Source: Statista. AI in healthcare: statistics & facts, 2026. Available from: https://www.statista.com/topics/10011/ai-in-healthcare/

Syllabus

Week 1 – Foundations of Generative AI in Healthcare
- Develop the foundations needed to use genAI critically and responsibly. You will explore how genAI works, different types of genAI tools and how effective prompting can shape outputs. Through interactive activities and worked examples, you will also examine why genAI can produce factual errors, hallucinations, bias and unsafe overconfidence and apply a safety loop that keeps human judgement at the centre of use.
Week 2 – Generative AI in Public Healthcare Contexts
- Explore how genAI can support planning and decision-making within complex public healthcare contexts. You will work through realistic healthcare challenges involving demand, resources, workforce planning and patient deterioration, critically examining how context, hidden assumptions, safety, fairness and equity can influence AI-generated recommendations. You will consider the respective contributions of genAI and humans and when professional judgement should guide, challenge or override an AI output.
Week 3 – Generative AI in Digital and Commercial Healthcare Contexts
- Examine how genAI is being used to support scalable, digital and commercially delivered healthcare. You will explore patient-facing communication, automation and commercial AI products alongside important considerations around privacy, confidentiality, security and data use. You will also distinguish prompting from model training and fine-tuning and learn to critically evaluate commercial AI claims, including recognising potential AI washing and the importance of evidence and human oversight.
Week 4 – Generative AI in Healthcare Research, Education and Global Contexts
- Explore the wider implications of genAI use in healthcare. You will examine research integrity and evidence, explore why genAI may perform differently across populations and settings and consider representation, access, equity and local suitability. You will also explore the environmental impact of genAI and bring these perspectives together to make informed, human-centred decisions about whether and how genAI should be used.