Medical student evaluation using augmented standardized patients: new development and results.

Standardized patients (SPs), individuals who realistically portray patients, are widely used in medical education to teach and assess communication skills, eliciting a history, performing a physical exam, and other important clinical skills. They are typically healthy individuals with few or no abnormal physical findings. One limitation is that each SP can only portray a limited set of physical symptoms.

Prerequisite competencies for third-year clerkships: an interdisciplinary approach.

The Collaborative Curriculum Project (CCP) is one of three components of the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource Project (FMCRP), a federally funded effort to provide resources for medical education curricula at the beginning of the 21st century. Medical educators and staff from public and private geographically distributed medical schools and national specialty organizations in family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics developed by consensus essential clinical competencies that all students should have by the beginning of the traditional clerkship year. These competencies are behaviorally measurable and organized into the domains used for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies.

Medical student evaluation using augmented standardized patients: preliminary results.

Standardized patients (SPs), individuals trained to realistically portray patients, are commonly used to teach and assess medical students. The range of clinical problems an SP can portray, however, is limited. They are typically healthy individuals with few or no abnormal physical findings.