The standardized patient program is an educational resource, used for both teaching and evaluating the clinical skills of medical students and other health professional students and residents. It is housed in the Clinical Simulation Facility of USC Keck School of Medicine.

Standardized patients have been used at the USC Keck School of Medicine, since 1963, when it was first introduced by Howard Barrows and Stephen Abrahamson. In the 1990s, the Macy Foundation awarded grants to support six consortia of medical schools for developing and utilizing a standardized patient Clinical Practice Examination. USC was one of the medical schools in the Southern California Consortium, and the SP Program began its inception from then.

What is a standardized patient?

A "Standardized Patient" (SP) is a person who has been carefully trained to portray all of the characteristics of a real patient, in order to provide an opportunity for a student to learn, or be evaluated, on clinical skills first hand. Standardized patients portray cases, which are based on actual patients encountered by physicians. The standardized patient is trained to simulate the signs and symptoms of the actual patient. Some individuals with stable, abnormal physical findings are also recruited as standardized patients. Unlike real ill patients who may not be able to undergo repeated examinations by the students, standardized patients can reproduce the history, behaviors and symptoms of the patients over and over again.

Standardized Patients are carefully trained to provide feedback to the students, especially with regard to communication and interpersonal skills. The feedback, which the standardized patient provides, is unique since in many cases, it may be the only source of information which the student would receive from a patient, with regard to communication skills. This is because a real patient would not be under any obligation to express any difficulties/problems, which he/she encounters with the student or physician.