Northern Arizona University's College of Health and Human Services is now accepting applications for two fully online certificate programs that train healthcare workers to use AI tools in public and clinical health. The programs, available at the undergraduate and graduate levels, address a growing demand from hospital systems for staff who can build and apply AI to massive health datasets.
The goal, said program director Tim Curry, a lecturer in the Department of Health Sciences, is to give healthcare providers the knowledge to create AI tools that analyze the vast amounts of available health data and deliver more personalized care to patients and communities. "It's not replacing the physician; it's allowing you to know more and make a more informed choice," Curry said. "It's allowing us to take the vast amount of data that we have and learn more than we've been able to in the past."
Both programs are fully online and require no previous coding experience, making them accessible to working professionals. Curry said hospital groups have told him they see a need for employees with AI for Healthcare skills. Students will get support throughout to build the analytics and coding background needed to develop and update AI programs that solve problems in their own organizations.
Two certificate tracks
The undergraduate and graduate certificates each take a different approach to preparing students for AI work in clinical and public health settings. While the undergraduate program focuses on foundational analytics and coding, the graduate track pushes deeper into applied AI tools and the ethical and regulatory realities of using patient data.
Undergraduate certificate: Applied health analytics
The 16-credit undergraduate certificate combines courses in applied health analytics and biostatistics with classes on coding, hardware and software, and SQL and database use. The latter three are taught in partnership with the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems. A central goal is for students to become fluent in Python, the versatile coding language behind most AI programming.
Curry pointed to cancer treatment as an example of where AI can handle the complexity. A patient's age, race, ZIP code, family history, and the roughly 1,000 new journal articles published each month all influence treatment decisions. No clinician can manually process thousands of studies, but an AI program can. With the right tool, a provider enters patient data, and the system considers all available research to recommend treatment options, leaving the final decision to the care team. AI can also spot patterns across decades of health data that healthcare organizations have already collected.
Graduate certificate: AI in Health
The 13-credit graduate certificate includes biostatistics at the graduate level and an applied health analytics course, but the Python course is tailored to healthcare problems. The fourth course, AI in Health, pushes students into what Curry called the "bleeding edge" of AI application in health. Students develop an AI-enabled tool for a problem they see, often one they encounter in their own work. The curriculum also covers patient privacy, including HIPAA and GDPR regulations, the morality of using personal data in AI, information security, and patients' rights around their own information.
Students will also examine how tribal and data sovereignty affect the ways healthcare systems can use patient data. Curry gave the example of a patient who lives in a tribal nation but seeks care at a Phoenix hospital-their personal data may be protected by a different set of regulations than a non-Native resident at the same facility.
Why this matters for healthcare professionals
These certificates offer a direct path into AI work without requiring a coding background. The programs are fully online and designed for working professionals, with applied projects that let students address real problems they face in their jobs. Hospital groups are already signaling that they need employees who understand how these tools work and what they can do. For healthcare providers who want to stay ahead of the shift toward data-driven care, the programs provide a practical, supported way to build those skills now.
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