Healthcare is the prevention and treatment of illness as well as the improvement of wellbeing by medical professionals. This term can be used to describe healthcare provided to individuals, but often refers to the healthcare delivery systems responsible for providing health services to communities more broadly, including entire countries. Access to healthcare is thus important for promoting and maintaining the physical and mental wellbeing of the general public.

Healthcare is especially important to learn about because it is becoming more complex as health economics change. In the United States and other countries, the question of how to provide affordable and effective health insurance has been a politically challenging one, as healthcare costs have grown alongside aging populations - and existing government policies to ensure healthcare access have struggled to keep up. The provision of insurance and health services more broadly may be covered by public entities, private companies, or both, and different countries are attempting to meet these needs with different combinations of policy frameworks.

As in other areas of the economy, the growing use of information technology holds promise to transform this sector. Health informatics is helping medical professionals manage patient data far more efficiently, facilitating better treatment and enhanced collaboration between different healthcare providers. The power of this approach will be further enhanced by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which will allow doctors to harness more information for diagnosis and develop data-driven decision support systems for the evaluation of different treatments for patients.

The functioning of the healthcare system depends on not only doctors and nurses but on the skilled healthcare administration professionals who manage hospitals and clinics where they work. These administrators are responsible for ensuring the coordination of everything that goes into the effective delivery of healthcare services as well as the financial sustainability of their operations.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these healthcare administrators and healthcare services managers are in high demand, with jobs in this area expected to grow much faster than the rest of the economy over the next decade. These roles are also highly paid; in 2019, they earned a median annual salary of $100,980.

Yes! There are opportunities to learn about a wide range of health and wellness topics on Coursera, including courses and Specializations spanning multiple courses about healthcare specifically. You can learn about the business of healthcare, the laws and policy frameworks that govern it, or the ways that technology advances are creating new possibilities in the sector. Across all of these healthcare topics and more, you can learn from top-ranked institutions like Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Minnesota.