C3NY maintains a diverse cadre of intelligent, well trained professionals (standardized patients - SPs) who can portray anything from a 16 year old runaway, to a 45 year old man with adult onset diabetes, to a 77 year old with Alzheimer’s.

We recruit our standardized patients (SPs) from the large and talented pool of individuals in the tri-state area, many of whom have Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degrees, either in education, medicine, or the arts. The vast majority of our SPs have up to eight years experience as SPs in various medical education settings. In addition a good number of our people also have extensive experience in similar programs, i.e. programs utilizing simulated encounters either in medicine, law or finance.

Our SPs go through a rigorous screening and training process, tailored to each individual program and case. Shown below are photos taken at the Clinical Skills Center of the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) in Newark, where C3NY produces up to an eight station clinical skills exercise for third year medical students from area medical schools. The photos illustrate part of the extensive training process used to ensure the inter-rater reliability evaluation of our SPs.

As appropriate, SPs may be trained to:

Presently we maintain an active database of 250+ SPs, drawn from our more comprehensive and diverse database of 1600 SPs of varying sizes, ages, ethnicities and talents.

We also have the expertise to create cases, depending on the needs of our constituent programs. We work with our partners to create the necessary biographical sketches, scenarios, history, physical and communications skills checklists, and then cast and train our people to perform them as needed.

In addition to the standard physical cases, such as cholecystitis, migraine headache, lupus, adult onset diabetes, etc., we also develop and train cases in psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and the like.

The use of standardized patients in the field of medical education has risen exponentially in the past several years. The emphasis has shifted from a knowledge based curriculum to a clinical skills based curriculum. With the Step 2-CS examination that is now being required by the USMLE for licensure, the field of standardized patients has really come into its own.  The sky’s the limit for the use of standardized patients as professional medical educators.


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