Episode #363: Building skill through Simulation training and it’s impact on Doctor confidence

Narrator: This is the Less Insurance Dependence podcast show with my good friend Gary Takacs and myself, Naren Arulrajah.

Narrator: We appreciate your listenership, your time, and most of all, we appreciate your intention to reduce insurance dependence in your practice. Our goal is to provide information that will help you successfully reduce insurance dependence and convert your practice into a thriving and profitable dental practice that provides you with personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Lester De Alwis: Welcome to another episode of the Less Insurance Dependence podcast, your trusted source for insights, strategies, and expert advice to help dental professionals take control of their practices and careers. I’m Lester De Alwis, your co-host, and I’m thrilled to bring you another inspiring episode with a visionary leader in dentistry, Dr. Lincoln Harris.

At Less Insurance Dependence, our mission is to help dentists reduce their reliance on insurance and build profitable, patient-centered, and fulfilling practices.

Before we dive in, a quick message from our sponsors — Ekwa Marketing is offering a complimentary marketing strategy meeting where the experts will show you how to attract high-quality new patients, rank number one on Google locally, and grow your patient flow steadily.

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Now, onto today’s episode — I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Lincoln Harris, founder and CEO of RipeGlobal, a trailblazer in cloud-based dental education. RipeGlobal’s immersive hands-on training programs are helping more than 85,000 dentists across 35 countries grow their confidence, increase production, and build thriving practices — all without leaving their clinics.

In today’s conversation, we’ll explore how innovation and mindset are transforming dentistry, helping clinicians become more independent, efficient, and fulfilled.

Dr. Harris, we’re excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure. I look forward to having this time with you today. I think that helping people be independent of insurance is a worthy goal, so kudos to you.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. Thank you so much. So, let’s start at the beginning — what inspired you to create RipeGlobal, and how has it helped dentists take control of their growth and reduce dependence on insurance-driven models?

Dr. Lincoln Harris: The platform that we’ve built, and continue to build, was to solve our own problem. Our problem was that I lived in a small village in Australia, far from any capital cities, yet I was running one of the largest training programs for dentists in the Asia-Pacific region.

I had requests, because of social media, to teach dentists all over the world, but I had no real method to do that except to spend my life on a plane — which is actually quite humorous, and we’ll get to why that’s so humorous in a moment.

So, I’m sitting there, and I have this idea to take our innovative training methods global, but I don’t really know how to, and I don’t really have the time. I was quite comfortable and making a lot of money.

So my incentive to find new ways of doing things was quite low — and then COVID came. Suddenly, I wasn’t comfortable, and I had plenty of time. Literally within four days of COVID locking the border, we had pivoted our entire company to ask: How do we solve this problem in a cloud-based format?

Now, obviously, everyone says, “Yes, but cloud-based education — everyone does that.” But that’s not true, because everyone does knowledge, and knowledge doesn’t teach you a procedure. Procedures are a technical skill that require repetitions with your hands. You can’t currently teach procedures using a simple online format — you have to build a simulation training format.

And that basically boiled down to a simple statement: If no one could ever fly again, how do you teach someone to do a procedure?

Obviously, there’s a certain amount of live-patient training that goes on with dentists, but there’s also a lot of preclinical work — and all of the preclinical bit we can do with our simulation training.

Now, of course, when we say that, people go, “Oh, but haptic feedback and VR.” And we say, “Well, we thought of that too.” Like, why does everyone go straight to haptic feedback and VR? Exactly — haptic feedback is solving the problem of having tactile sensation. We already solved that about a hundred years ago with plastic teeth.

And VR? That’s how you make a simple solution really expensive and complicated. So, we rejected that method because right now, it’s way too expensive to ship and sell to dentists — those units are around a hundred thousand dollars each.

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Mm-hmm. So, we invented these training mannequins that are similar to the ones used in dental schools, but they’re designed to be shipped. Then we built an entire training method around teaching dentists to learn new skills in their own clinics.

The outcome of this is really interesting — it’s like an aircraft simulator. I was a pilot before I was a dentist, and I realized that if you want to run a simulation, you should make it as realistic as possible. If you want to fly a Cessna, the simulation should be a Cessna — not a Piper or a Gulfstream, and vice versa.

So, the best simulation of a dentist treating a patient in their clinic is to actually train in their own clinic — sitting in the same chair, with the same handpiece, the same burs, the same resins, the same everything.

What we’ve shown is that the implementation rate is three to four times higher than if you just go away to an institute-based course. You know, you get lots of emotional wellbeing from being at an institute course — you can catch up with your friends, have a party, have a hangover, all of those things — but you can’t practice in a realistic environment. So, the implementation of procedures becomes much more difficult.

That’s how we ended up here — just solving the problem of globally scaling training when you’re stuck in a small village in the Southern Hemisphere.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly, exactly. That’s such an inspiring story, Dr. Harris. What really stands out is how you made world-class education and innovation more accessible. Many dentists struggle to grow their skills because of time constraints — they just can’t leave their practices to attend advanced training.

Now, you did explain a bit earlier, but can you elaborate more on RipeGlobal’s model and how it solves this challenge? How does RipeGlobal’s cloud-based training help dentists continue hands-on learning without stepping away from their practice?

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Yeah, so there were two big innovations, and one of them I had actually started before RipeGlobal.

The first one was that dentists need to do a lot of repetitions.

Lester De Alwis: Hmm.

Dr. Lincoln Harris: When you’re building a skill in any field, you practice until you fail — and you do that in a safe environment. If you’re learning the violin, you practice until you fail, but you don’t do it in front of a concert audience. You do it in a practice room, where there’s no downside to making a mistake. But you have to make mistakes — it’s impossible to learn a skill without making them.

What happens with dentists is that they graduate with only a small fraction of their potential skills, and then they often don’t practice. Every time they’re “practicing,” it’s actually a concert — they’re treating a patient. You can’t experiment, you can’t push boundaries, you can’t find out what you’re truly capable of, because you can’t take risks with a live human being.

So, the first big innovation was to make hands-on training truly hands-on. Nearly every course in the world — well, 90-something percent — follows the same model as dental school: a lot of theory and didactics, a demonstration by an expert, and then a very small amount of time for the dentist to do their own repetitions. Maybe they do one crown, one implant on a plastic jaw — but very few repetitions.

Nearly nine years ago, our first major innovation was to push all of the didactics online — well before anyone else was doing this. So, you do all the theoretical learning before you show up to the hands-on. Then, when you’re at the hands-on, all you do is hands-on work. Instead of doing one repetition, maybe you do 10, 15, or 20.

That builds real skill. It also gives you time to make mistakes and practice until those mistakes disappear — turning it from an intellectual exercise into a genuine skill exercise.

The second innovation was developing a method for using our simulation mannequins, designed to attach to your own dental chair. That’s what we built during 2020. So, there are three components: the mannequins, the software, and the methods.

The mannequins are similar to dental school ones, but built to sit on your own chair rather than in a simulation lab. That way, you can train using the same tools, environment, and ergonomics you normally use. It might be less social, but it’s far more effective.

The second part — there was no specialized software for teaching procedures, so we had to build that. We developed specialized software for procedural training.

The third part is the method of training. Traditional courses are scheduled based on when it’s convenient for people to fly somewhere — not when it’s the best time to learn something. We’ve decoupled learning from geography. We don’t have to cram everything into a two-day course in Arizona or Florida just because that’s where everyone happens to meet.

Those are the three things we developed — and we’ve refined them continuously. Now we’re at the stage where we’ve prototyped, and are preparing to produce, mannequins that have sensor technology built in. These provide real-time feedback while you’re working.

So, as you’re practicing, your computer screen gives you useful metrics about how you’re performing and what you can improve.

That’s the essence of the method — and the reason we don’t rely on VR or haptic feedback is that those systems still cost more than a mannequin. A mannequin is a real physical object you can actually practice on. Sure, you might go through about a hundred dollars’ worth of teeth in a typical session, but you get a lot of repetitions for that.

Until haptic feedback and VR become affordable — say, under a thousand dollars — we won’t be using them at scale. And even when they do, it’ll still come down to the software, method, and experience. That’s basically how the actual training system works.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. I mean, that’s a powerful way to blend technology with real-world application. But beyond the technical training, you often speak about the importance of mindset. Let’s dive into that. What mental shifts do dentists need to make to truly grow and become less dependent on insurance?

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Now, this is super interesting — and the longer I do this, the more interesting it gets. Dental schools are very good at graduating people who are technically competent but whose self-esteem has been crushed. They’ve been taught perfectionism — either to get into dental school or to get through dental school — and they develop a severe difficulty with failure and with actually doing procedures.

There’s a whole group of people in dental schools who basically spend their time telling students that procedures are bad. So, you graduate and you feel like procedures are “wicked.”

The second challenge dentists face is getting used to the fact that they are profiting from someone else’s problems. Now, almost everyone does that — that’s literally how profit works: you solve problems. Every dentist, every business in the world, makes profit by solving problems. But dentists often feel guilty about the fact that they’re profiting while solving a patient’s problem.

So, there are several aspects to building self-esteem, confidence, and leadership skills in dentists — and it’s fascinating.

Part of it is skill. As a dentist, you are selling your procedural or surgical skill. That’s literally your product — you are the product. And if you don’t believe in your product, it’s very difficult to sell it.

We typically see dentists struggle with the cost side of dentistry because they don’t think they’re worth it. They don’t believe in their own value. That’s why they gravitate toward insurance — they think, “My skills aren’t good enough; I can’t charge patients directly.”

So, part of the solution is developing skill — being able to confidently say, “I can do this procedure, and I can do it well.”

The second part is leadership. Dentists aren’t taught decisiveness. Leaders don’t always know the right answer — they just make a decision. But dentists, because they’ve been conditioned toward perfectionism, feel like they must make the right decision instead of making a decision.

As a leader, you learn that the most important thing is often to make a decision — and to make it decisively. The risk of not deciding usually outweighs the risk of making a wrong decision. There’s a cost to delay, a cost to hesitation, and a cost to not being able to decide.

This is such a big issue that we’ve actually built an alignment training program for all of our dentists. Even though we teach clinical skills through simulation and online methods, we first bring everyone together before they start any course.

We teach communication, diagnosis, and consultation — how to help patients sell the treatment to themselves through the questions you ask, how to lead a patient rather than push them, and how to deliver high levels of service, both clinically and emotionally.

We do this because if you don’t solve mindset, self-esteem, leadership, communication, and money issues first, you can’t teach a dentist a skill. The foundation for learning any new skill is being able to sell it — to get case acceptance.

If you can’t get case acceptance, you never perform the procedure. And if you never perform the procedure, you can’t learn it. It’s this terrible catch-22: you can’t get case acceptance because you haven’t done it, and you haven’t done it because you can’t get case acceptance.

So, we’ve built a whole method around breaking that cycle. We even consult with larger dental groups to help them solve those same problems, especially when it comes to implementation.

I’m sure you see this on the insurance side too — dentists who struggle to look a patient in the eye and say, “This will cost $5,000 or $10,000,” because they have deep-rooted self-esteem issues tied to pricing.

Lester De Alwis: Yeah, yeah — that’s so true. Mindset really drives everything else. And I imagine this is especially relevant for dentists working in DSOs or groups, where growth can look a bit different. How does RipeGlobal’s model help larger dental organizations scale training and achieve measurable ROI?

Dr. Lincoln Harris: So, there are a couple of very important things. The first is — we’re not an education company. We do education, but what we’ve actually built is a platform that delivers performance for dentists.

We’re a performance-focused company, not an education-focused company. Education is simply the method we use to achieve performance. Most groups focus on education — which is the process — but we focus on outcomes, which is performance. And that’s much more difficult to do.

It’s easy to do what dental schools do — and I don’t want to be too hard on them because they have an impossible job. They’re trying to do 10 years of training in four years, so they simply don’t have enough time.

But in dental schools, the goal is to get you a license, not to make you good. The purpose of dental school is to legally allow you to become a dentist — not necessarily a great dentist.

Once you’re a dentist, my goal is to help you go from there to highly productive — clinically excellent, efficient, and financially successful. And if you’re employed by someone else, my goal is for both you and your employer to be successful.

With large groups, we have a range of performance-focused programs that solve very specific problems.

A typical challenge in larger organizations is that many dentists under-diagnose — they don’t treatment plan enough, or their treatment plans are too small because they’re afraid to tell patients what’s really going on.

We can scale training for that problem dramatically. We work with organizations ranging from small practices with 4 dentists to global groups with over 4,000.

Here’s what we do: they tell us the problem, and we tailor a solution. We can run a pilot program to refine it, and once it’s refined, we can scale it up — to any size. No one else in the world can scale performance-based training like that.

If you said to me, “I need to train 100 dentists on crown preps and how to get better case acceptance for crown preps — and I need it done within three months,” I can do that. And if 10 groups all asked me the same thing simultaneously, I can still deliver.

There’s essentially no other company that can scale performance-based training that delivers measurable ROI.

Now, how do we achieve ROI? Because we focus on it directly.

For the individual dentist, the skill development alone is valuable. But for business owners, there also has to be a financial return. Typically, for a program to be worthwhile, you’d want an ROI of six to eight times the cost — meaning your EBITDA should increase by roughly the cost of the course within a 12-month period.

For us, that’s too low. We usually aim three to four times higher — and we often guarantee those results.

In our pilot studies, we do guarantee them. So, there’s literally zero risk — if the dentists show up, engage, and do the work, we guarantee they’ll increase their production by at least $100 per hour.

If they don’t show up, that’s not a training issue — it’s a cultural problem within the organization, where leadership can’t communicate effectively enough to get dentists engaged.

So, our approach is low risk and high return.

Also, because we’re not tied to physical campuses or institutes, we don’t have to pay for real estate, facilities, or overheads like flights, hotels, and accommodation.

When you remove all those costs, our total expense is about one-quarter of traditional training methods — while producing higher and guaranteed outcomes.

That’s why our return on investment is so high.

Lester De Alwis: I love that. You’re not just training or educating — you’re focusing on performance, as you said. You’re helping dentists transform how they think about efficiency and scalability.

Now, looking forward — technology continues to reshape dentistry at a rapid pace. What role do you see innovation playing in the next chapter of clinical and insurance independence?

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Yeah, look, I think that over the next 10 years, we’re going to see a slow transition where dentists begin to scale up dramatically.

Let me explain that. In the United States, there’s something that almost no other country has — extended duty dental assistants. There’s also a much higher ratio of hygienists to dentists.

Most countries actually graduate more dentists than hygienists. For example, in Australia, where I come from, they graduate about six dentists for every hygienist. Hygienists there are nearly as expensive as dentists, and almost nowhere else has extended duty dental assistants.

This structure in the U.S. has allowed dentists to increase their income over time, even though fees haven’t grown at the same pace — because one dentist can see so many more patients.

Now, what I see happening is two main drivers of growth. With better training — like the type we provide — the average dentist can become massively more productive.

If you haven’t seen it done, it’s hard to imagine. But from my first year of practice to my twenty-fourth year — before I moved to the United States — my production increased twelvefold. By my final year, I was producing in a month what I used to produce in an entire year.

If you’ve never seen that kind of growth, it sounds impossible. Dentists often say, “I’m already busy; how could I be more productive?”

But productivity doesn’t just mean being busier — it means doing more productive work. For example, you learn to do more teeth per appointment so you don’t waste time turning rooms over between patients. You diagnose properly and do the right procedure, not a compromise because you were too scared to discuss cost.

And, of course, doing the right procedure is almost always more expensive — but it’s also better for the patient.

Beyond that, I expect we’ll see increasing AI-driven assistance. It’s already happening — things like automated note-taking are becoming mainstream.

We’re also seeing robotics emerge. There are robots in development in France that can perform veneer preps, and in the United States, there’s work being done on robots that can do crown preps. So the technology is coming.

Over time, the question will shift to: How do we train dentists to work with this technology?

I think it’ll still be quite a while before we reach fully robotic dental clinics. I don’t see patients walking into a 100% robot-run office within the next 10 years — but certain tasks will absolutely become automated.

Even then, dentists will still need to know how to perform those procedures manually. It’s just like guided surgery — you can use guides for implant placement, but you still need to know how to do it freehand in case something goes wrong.

These advances will make dentists far more productive and, as a result, allow more patients to afford more care.

That’s my crystal ball — but we’ll see how it plays out.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. That’s such a forward-thinking perspective, Dr. Harris, and a great reminder that continuous learning truly leads to independence for dental professionals.

Now, if anyone wants to get in contact or take action after listening to this podcast, how can they reach out to you or RipeGlobal?

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Yeah, so they can go to ripeglobal.com — that’s R-I-P-E Global — and I’m sure the link will be included somewhere. They can also email us at info@ripeglobal.com.

They can reach out to one of our sales team members, or send me a message directly on LinkedIn or Instagram — there are plenty of ways to get in touch.

Right now, our focus is very much on two areas: individual dentists who want to build their skills, and larger groups. Our traction with DSOs has been incredible. We started in the United States just two months ago, and we’ve already signed six DSOs — and these are actual paying clients.

Anyone who knows the DSO space knows that the sales cycle is usually long, but we’ve shown that it doesn’t have to be. When you solve a big enough problem, the process moves quickly.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly, exactly. Dr. Harris, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing such powerful insights on how education and innovation can empower dentists to create more fulfilling and independent careers.

Dr. Lincoln Harris: Thank you so much for having me, Lester.

Lester De Alwis: The key takeaway from today’s episode is that continuous learning and mentorship aren’t just about improving clinical skills — they’re about reclaiming freedom, confidence, and choice in how you practice.

And as always, this podcast is about taking action.

First, if you want to attract high-quality patients and reduce reliance on PPO plans, schedule a complimentary marketing strategy meeting with Ekwa Marketing at lessinsurancedependence.com/marketing-strategy-meeting.

Second, if you’re looking for mentorship or guidance — if you’re ready to build a thriving, fee-for-service practice with personalized coaching — schedule a complimentary coaching strategy meeting with Gary Takacs at thrivingdentist.com/csm.

Both of these are complimentary resources designed to help you take meaningful steps toward the practice and the life you truly deserve.

If you found value in today’s episode, please share it with a colleague or friend who could benefit from reducing their insurance dependence.

Thank you for spending your time with us today. I look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode of the Less Insurance Dependence Podcast.

Until then, keep moving forward — toward a thriving, independent practice.