What Does World-Class Patient Advocacy Look Like in Private Healthcare?

In private healthcare, experience has become one of the clearest signals of quality. Patients are not only judging their care by the clinical outcome. They are judging how supported they felt, how clearly they were communicated with, how easy it was to navigate the journey, and whether the experience gave them confidence in the provider.

For healthcare organisations, this matters.

A strong patient experience can influence trust, loyalty, reputation and growth. But experience is not always easy to evaluate in isolation. A healthcare provider may know its own scores are improving, but still not know how that performance compares with similar organisations, service lines or markets.

That is where benchmarking becomes valuable. Benchmarking helps turn patient feedback into perspective. It allows organisations to see where performance is genuinely strong, where there is room to improve, and where the greatest opportunities may sit across the patient journey.

Our 2026 Private Healthcare Industry Benchmarking Report brings together anonymised patient experience data from our private healthcare clients across APAC and EMEA. It explores Net Promoter Score (NPS) and response rate insights across four key service areas: inpatient care, day surgery, outpatient care, and diagnostics and imaging.

The report shows that world-class patient advocacy is already being achieved across private healthcare. Using Bain & Company’s definition of a “world-class” NPS as a score above 80, many of our clients are achieving or exceeding this across the key service areas. The strongest provider results reached 96 for inpatient care, 95 for day surgery, 94 for diagnostics and imaging, and 93 for outpatient care.

These results show what is possible across very different care settings, while raising the bigger question explored in the full report: what are leading providers doing differently, and how can strong patient advocacy be delivered more consistently?

The findings also highlight an important point about patient listening: visibility matters. Inpatient care achieved the strongest email engagement across the benchmark, showing that patients are willing to share feedback when the request is relevant, timely and aligned to the care context.

For private healthcare providers, the opportunity is not just to measure experience, but to understand what drives it.

Patient feedback becomes more powerful when it is connected to the moments that shape confidence, trust and recommendation. Benchmarking provides the wider context, helping organisations move from knowing their own performance to understanding where they stand, what good looks like, and where improvement can have the greatest impact.

The 2026 Private Healthcare Industry Benchmarking Report offers a closer look at these patterns across service areas, regions and engagement channels, giving healthcare leaders a clearer view of patient advocacy across the private healthcare sector.