Case management service quality and patient-centered care Sandun Perera College of Business, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA, and Beverly Waller Dabney School of Nursing, University of Michigan, Flint, Michigan, USA Abstract Purpose – Providing care that is patient-centered is an important objective in the modern healthcare industry. Despite this objective, hospital inpatient case managers and the services they provide are evaluated routinely without including patients’ perspectives. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to fill this research gap by using patient expectations and perceptions to assess the overall quality of and patient satisfaction with hospital case management services. Design/methodology/approach – This paper investigates five dimensions of case management services – reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles – and how they affect overall quality and patient satisfaction. Study surveys are based on the SERVQUAL instrument. Survey data from a cross-sectional sample of 67 inpatients are analyzed using principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, GAP analysis and a predictive model. Findings – The preliminary part of the study identifies “tangibles” and “nontangibles”– reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy – as the main components. Among these two components, only nontangibles have a positive and significant effect on both quality and patient satisfaction according to patient perspectives. GAP analysis indicates that gaps between patient expectations and perceptions of reliability and assurance are significant. Finally, the proposed predictive model reveals that gaps in assurance have a significant impact on both overall quality and satisfaction, while gaps in empathy have a significant impact on satisfaction, but not overall quality. Originality/value – Studies on service quality at the case manager level are limited. This study is the first in this domain to evaluate quality and satisfaction from the patient perspective. Keywords Case management service quality, Patient-centered care, Customer satisfaction, Empirical (survey) research Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction As healthcare organizations and hospitals become driven mainly by patient-generated revenues, providing patient-centered services is an operational imperative. Among all types of patients, inpatients – those who stay in a hospital during treatment – have specific needs and interact directly with hospital case managers. Despite such interaction, assessing inpatients’ perceptions of case management services is challenging. In fact, inpatient case managers and their services are routinely evaluated externally without including the patient perspective. Therefore, this study assesses case management service quality using actual patients’ expectations and perceptions of such services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first rigorous study integrating patient-centeredness into the assessment of case management services. Primary study data were collected in two stages. In the first stage, patients’ expectations for case manager service quality were obtained from inpatients at one of the largest healthcare complexes (hospitals) in the United States (US). In the second stage, patient’ perceptions of the actual service provided by the hospital’s case managers were obtained either online via Case management service quality 551 We thank the editor, Professor Suzanne Robinson, for her precious time, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support received from the School of Nursing at the University of Michigan-Flint. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1477-7266.htm Received 9 December 2019 Revised 3 May 2020 Accepted 29 May 2020 Journal of Health Organization and Management Vol. 34 No. 5, 2020 pp. 551-568 © Emerald Publishing Limited 1477-7266 DOI 10.1108/JHOM-12-2019-0347