Google launches short AI certificate for healthcare workers, focused on non-clinical tasks

Google launched the Google AI for Healthcare Professionals Certificate on October 29, 2026, offering healthcare workers a short training program focused on work outside clinical decision-making. Its lessons cover administrative tasks, patient communication and professional learning, with the stated aim of freeing more time for patient care while protecting safety and privacy.

The self-paced program contains four courses and is designed to take less than five hours. Learners can earn up to 5.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits, a form of continuing medical education credit. Registration is open through grow.google/healthcare. The short format is intended to fit around busy healthcare schedules, rather than require an extended course of study.

From evaluating answers to building small tools

The curriculum starts with recognizing useful applications and evaluating what an AI system produces. From there, it moves into communication, routine office work and learning. Google describes four areas of instruction, each tied to tasks healthcare professionals might encounter in their daily work:

• Foundational skills: Identify practical uses for AI and assess its outputs. Google places clinical judgment, safety and privacy within this foundation, making evaluation part of the training rather than focusing only on getting a tool to generate an answer.
• Patient communication: Turn complex medical concepts into audio and visual guides that patients can understand. The stated purpose is to help patients better understand and manage their care, using AI to assist with how information is explained.
• Administrative work: Apply AI to scheduling and reviewing dense email threads. This part also introduces building useful tools without coding, using ordinary-language instructions—a route to creating work aids that does not depend on writing software.
• Professional learning: Use AI to digest complex clinical studies, organize presentations and prepare for exams or certifications. This course concerns how healthcare workers keep learning and organize information, alongside the program’s lessons on communication and administrative tasks.

our goal is simple: to give you back the time, the focus, and the joy of caring for your patients.

Dr. Michael Howell, Google Chief Health Officer

Clinician-built, with medical and nursing institutions participating

Clinicians at Google developed the curriculum, bringing backgrounds in internal medicine, pediatrics, critical care, emergency medicine and public health. Google says academic and professional organizations reviewed it. That development process places healthcare expertise inside the course design, rather than presenting the certificate as a general AI course with a few medical examples.

The curriculum also drew on draft versions of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ AI competencies for medical education. Google notes that those competencies were still under development when the initial course was designed, though it says the drafts reflected the overall direction of the final competencies. That is a curriculum reference, not a claim that AAMC developed the certificate.

Distribution is already extending into professional education. According to Google’s announcement, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Touro University are offering the training to faculty, residents and medical students. Purdue University School of Nursing is also offering the certificate as part of its healthcare professional training, giving the program a nursing route alongside its medical-school participation.