Patient-centered communication: an extension of the HCAHPS survey Shahidul Islam School of Business and Economics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei and Department of Marketing, Comilla University, Cumilla, Bangladesh, and Nazlida Muhamad School of Business and Economics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Abstract Purpose – The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) has been recognized as a “gold standard” set of “practical standardized measures” for assessing hospital service quality. Beginning with the HCAHPS, the purpose of this paper is to extend efforts to assess patient-centered communication (PCC) and the quality of healthcare and presents a scale for measuring patient perceptions and expectations of service quality in an emerging economy context. Design/methodology/approach – A self-administered survey of patients in private hospitals (N 5 171) was conducted to test the proposed framework. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to establish the measurement model. Multiple regression analysis was used to explain the scale’s predictive ability. ANOVA was used to analyze service quality gaps and rank patients’ priorities. Findings – Five components of PCC are identified. Among these, nurse affective communication has a significant positive effect on patient satisfaction. The gap analysis shows that patients have high expectations for doctors’ affective communication, while they perceive a low level of service performance in the realm of nurse affective communication. The study highlights a new means of measuring “reliability” in healthcare. Important findings on patients’ priorities are evaluated and discussed. Practical implications – Healthcare organizations and practitioners can improve patient-centered care by stressing the dimensions of PCC, including clinicians’ affective and instrumental communication. Originality/value – The study expands the understanding of HCAHPS instruments in an emerging economy context and opens avenues for more widespread use of the measures. The research contributes to the literature on patient-centered care and healthcare service quality by proposing a scale for managing specific practices and interactions in healthcare. Keywords HCAHPS, Healthcare, Service quality, Patient-centered communication, Patient satisfaction, Patients’ priorities Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction Healthcare organizations’ interest in patient-centered communication (PCC) has increased over the last decade, as PCC leads to effective healthcare service delivery and subsequent positive healthcare outcomes (Belasen and Belasen, 2018; Srivastava and Singh, 2020). Previous studies have underscored the contributions of PCC in both immediate health-related outcomes (including patient compliance with physicians’ advice, medication adherence and successful medical treatment) and managerially pertinent outcomes (including quality of Patient- centered communication Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors Funding statement: The study was funded by Universiti Brunei Darussalam (Ref. file: UBD/AVC-R/1. 22). The funding body was not involved in the study. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1463-5771.htm Received 26 July 2020 Revised 1 December 2020 23 December 2020 Accepted 25 December 2020 Benchmarking: An International Journal © Emerald Publishing Limited 1463-5771 DOI 10.1108/BIJ-07-2020-0384