About this site
Service is a skill. The best teams can teach it.
Lessons for people who work in clinics, drawn from businesses that serve people unusually well.
Why it exists
Medical school teaches doctors to diagnose and to operate. Historically, it has spent less time on how to serve people well.
The Exceptional Private Practice was created by Dr. Thomas Hocker, a dermatologist and Mohs surgeon. In Northwestern’s Physician CEO program he fell in love with a side of business that medical training rarely covers: how the best organizations take care of the people they serve.
Many businesses outside medicine give their customers remarkable service. This site studies how they do it, then asks how the same habits could work in a clinic, so that we can serve our patients better. At heart, it is a servant’s mindset.
How a lesson works
Each lesson comes in two parts. The Daily Brief gives you one idea in about five minutes, with five practices for your clinic and one thing to do today.
The Interactive Web Book Chapter tells the whole story in about seventeen minutes: the evidence, two illustrated clinic examples and a one-week experiment for your team.
Start with a lesson
What this site is, and what it is not
- Education, not advice
- Everything here is free, general education about service and how a clinic runs. It is not medical advice, and reading it does not create a doctor-patient relationship. It is also not legal, financial, billing, employment or compliance advice. Your practice has its own laws, contracts and rules to follow, so talk with your own advisers before you change how you work.
- Ideas to test, not promises
- We describe what companies do from published sources, and we cite them. The suggestions for clinics are our own proposals. Most have not been tested in a clinic, and results will differ from one practice to the next. Nothing here guarantees an outcome.
- Independent
- This site is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by The Ritz-Carlton, Toyota or any other company it discusses. Company names and trademarks belong to their owners and appear only to identify the businesses being studied. Our analysis rests on published sources, and no company reviewed or approved it. The film on the front page and the illustrations are original dramatizations and explanatory artwork, not official company images, and the people in them are fictional.
- Accuracy
- We work to get the facts right and we link to our sources so you can check them. Even so, a lesson may contain mistakes or fall out of date. Use your own judgment. Decisions you make in your practice are yours, and to the extent the law allows, the site and its creator are not responsible for losses that come from relying on it.
- Whose views
- The views here are the author’s own. They do not speak for any employer, practice, hospital or professional society.
- Your privacy
- The site has no accounts, no forms, no advertising and no analytics. Chapters save one display setting in your own browser, and nothing about you is sent to us. Like any website, our hosting and font services receive basic technical details, such as an IP address, when a page loads.
© 2026 The Exceptional Private Practice. Last updated November 10, 2026.