REAP Sta Patients Sub

Standardized Patients

Cutting edge research into China's quality of care.

What they are:

Standardized patients (SP) are people recruited from local communities and trained to act as "undercover patients" to evaluate clinicians. They are trained to present symptoms of disease while wearing a wire to assess clinician behavior.

Standardized patients are the gold standard for assessing clinical practice.

As a methodology, standardized patients helps show where China is failing to provide quality health care.

Standardized patients are the best way to quantify the know-do gap.

With Standardized Patients, clinicians are unaware that they are being evaluated. This means that they act exactly as they would with any other patient.

REAP has trained hundreds of standardized patients to evaluate the quality of health care in rural clinics.Through the course of thousands of doctor-patient interactions, we have amassed the world’s largest dataset on the quality of health care in rural China, and are using it to advise local policymakers on strategies to improve the quality of care.