Standardized Patient Program

Your medical education at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine is enhanced through our Standardized Patient Program, which gives you hands-on patient care experience in a simulated environment.

Like most standardized patient programs at other medical schools, our standardized patients are trained to simulate medical cases and evaluate student performance. This helps you develop both your practical and interpersonal clinical skills by practicing a range of skills, from taking patient histories and conducting physical examinations, to important communication skills like counseling or delivering bad news.

At Carle Illinois, we’ve taken the standardized patient program further by integrating it throughout the curriculum. As a medical student here, you will first encounter a case in your problem-based learning environment, later meet that “patient” in the simulated clinic setting in your Introduction to Clinical Practice course, and then connect with them once again in a later case. As a result, you not only get more opportunities to practice and refine your skills, you’ll benefit from longitudinal exposure to these cases.