Students who earn this badge will complete a four-module course exploring the healthcare industry, career pathways, and essential healthcare concepts. Designed for students of all experience levels, the course covers healthcare systems, patient care roles, public health and medical innovations, and the business of healthcare. Badge earners learn through readings, videos, quizzes, and interactive activities to develop a foundational understanding of healthcare professions and industry trends. This course helps students prepare for future studies or careers in medicine, public health, allied health professions, healthcare administration, and related fields. 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 

• Explain how healthcare systems function and identify key career pathways in clinical, administrative, and public health fields 
• Demonstrate knowledge of patient care roles, including their responsibilities, required skills, and ethical considerations 
• Analyze how public health initiatives, medical technology, and innovations impact healthcare delivery and patient outcomes 
• Recognize the role of healthcare administration, policies, and financial structures in managing healthcare organizations 

Students who earn this badge will complete a four-module course introducing the basics of coding, software development, and data visualization. Designed for students with all levels of experience, this course covers simple Python programming, how software is created and improved over time, and how to make data easy to understand with charts and graphs. Badge earners will learn through readings, videos, and quizzes and completing practice programming activities to build a strong foundation in coding and data skills. This course helps students prepare for future studies or careers in technology, engineering, or related fields. 

This course is accessible to a student with no coding background or a student with programming experience in a language other than Python; the content will be all review for a student who has taken 6 months or more of Python coding.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 

• Explain how simple coding and software development processes can help create apps or programs that solve everyday problems 
• Demonstrate how to organize and clean data to make it easier to understand and find patterns or trends 
• Identify basic data types and data structures to create simple program 

Dr. Jay Spitulnik is the Director of the interdisciplinary Master of Science in Health Informatics program at Northeastern University. He brings a wealth of experience from corporate learning and the healthcare industry to Northeastern. Jay earned his BA and EdM from Boston University and his PhD in Organizational Psychology from Walden University.  

Dr. Yizhen Zhao earned a PhD in economics from Johns Hopkins University, where she specialized in time-series econometrics and finance. She is also an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern University, where she teaches Machine Learning in Finance class. She brings her Wall Street experience to class, which has given her a solid foundation in quantitative finance, machine learning modeling, programming, statistics, and asset pricing. Her Wall Street experience also included both sell-side and buy-side finance, focusing on equity investments, high-frequency trading, and machine learning. Dr. Zhao sees teaching as her way of giving back to the world, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. She is now expanding her research and teaching into blockchain technologies.