Under the harsh background of low fault tolerance and high ethical standards in current clinical teaching practice, introducing standardized patients (SP) into medical teaching system can largely avoid clinical and ethical risks and improve teaching efficiency. SP as a teaching method has the advantages of sensitive feedback to medical behavior, personalized customization according to teaching tasks, simulating doctor-patient interaction, promoting the improvement of evidence-based medicine ability, and contributing to the cultivation of patient-centered clinical concept. SP is also a means of evaluating teaching effectiveness. However, there are still some shortcomings in SP teaching system, such as limited application of diseases, difficulty in simulating objective signs, inappropriate for invasive operations, and objective differences between virtual experience and real situation. Standardized case design, specialized SP training, blind teaching, combination of artificial intelligence and regional SP sharing will be the future development direction of SP clinical teaching.