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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Scaling Dental Training with Dr. Lincoln Harris, Founder and CEO of RipeGlobal
00:16:12
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, this is Ariana Portolatin with the Beckers Dental and DSO Review podcast. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Lincoln Harris, the founder and CEO of Rype Global. Dr. Harris, thank you so much for being here today. It's great to have you.
- [00:12]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure, yes.
- [00:15]
A
To start us off, can you introduce yourself for our listeners and tell us a little bit about your background as well?
- [00:20]
B
Yeah. I'm the founder of Ripe Global. My background, I'm a general dentist. I became a dentist in 1998. I lived in rural Queensland in Australia. And my journey to where we are now started in this rural village where there's no specialists and I had to learn multidisciplinary dentistry, otherwise the patients couldn't have anything except extractions. And then over time, dentists started asking me where I learned all those things. So to start with, I just give them the list of all the courses I'd done in the United States and other places around the world. But over time I thought, why don't I teach them? So I've been running conferences, education, hands on training, and then our simulation training since 2006 in various stages. So that's kind of my background and how I got here. And then obviously this year I moved to the United States from Australia to continue the growth of the company.
- [01:17]
A
Great, thank you so much for sharing that. First question for you here. What are some of the biggest issues that you're following in the dental industry?
- [01:23]
B
Currently the biggest issue in dentistry I think is still the same as it has been for a long time. It's the people. Initially, we've used technology to solve all areas around the dentist. So we've used technology to automate marketing, we've used technology to automate the phone calls and to give you feedback using AI on the phone calls and how you have missed opportunities and how your phone calls can fall into lead generation funnels. The practice management software is now super sophisticated at diagnosing and bringing up opportunities in the patient journey. Obviously we now have our diagnostic AIs like Pearl and Overjet and others. And so we have pretty much AI'd every part of the dentist's practice except the dentist and the funnel or the choke point of all groups and DSOs and group practices is that the production or the revenue is still the hours worked times the average billing hour of the dentist. And so if the average billing hour is low, then the production of the practice or the group is low and the EBITDA is low. So Everywhere we go in the world, all over the United States, the DSOs and the groups that we talk to say their number one challenge is onboarding dentists, training them up, getting them productive, training dentists at scale. And really they're struggling with the fact that all of the infrastructure for training dentists is around the individual practice. It's not designed for groups that employ 300 or 500 or 1,000 or the biggest group we work with employs 4,000 dentists. So yeah, that's, that's kind of the, we hear the same thing everywhere. That's the challenge and that's the exciting thing for us too.
- [03:27]
A
Great. Can you tell us a little bit more about your work with Ripe Global and how you're working to solve some of those challenges in the industry?
- [03:33]
B
So we developed simulation. Actually we didn't develop it for DSOs. That was a side that, that was something we discovered later. I'd been running hands on courses in Australia and New Zealand and Singapore and then various countries in Europe and the UK and occasionally in the United States since about 2013 and around about 2018. I was trying to think, how do I scale this globally in a more sustainable fashion than me spending my entire life on a, on a jet. But, but at that particular time I was pretty comfortable and I didn't really have the time. And then Covid came along and Covid both made me uncomfortable, but it also gave me the time. And so we had the time to sit there and go, how do we scale hands on training? And then more specifically we thought if you couldn't fly people, obviously this was in our mind during COVID but if you couldn't fly someone, how do you teach a hand skill like a procedure? So not a, not the didactical, the theory of the procedure, but actual skill of it. And that's when we develop simulation training. So in a great flurry of activity in 2020 and 2021, we designed, got manufactured, prototyped the training mannequins that we shipped to 35 countries to train dentists. And then we also built the method because you train our dentists very differently using simulation training versus flying them to a facility. And we also then develop the software. So the reason I'm in America is because if you start doing hardware and software engineering and raising capital to do it, you relatively quickly end up in the United States. There's still no other country to do those things. So that's how we're solving it. And you know, we're so excited that when we were back running our first Simulation training courses with dentists. I think back then it was like, across about 15 or 20 countries. We were blown away at how fast they learned. And we noticed that the dentists were learning 50% faster with simulation than in a sim lab, like a traditional facility. And it took quite some time to work out what was causing the dentist to learn so quickly. And it's because when you're not sitting next to them and you're using our platform, you have to be very visual in your feedback. And the visual feedback allows the dentist to see what they need to correct so much better than when you sit in a facility and you point at things with a probe, which is the traditional way of teaching. So it also, because of the cost, it's so much less expensive. We can afford to get the dentist to do often 10 times as many repetitions in training. So the value proposition, like, for the same cost, the value proposition is massively higher. But, you know, it's not the same cost. It's something like three quarters of the cost of training a dentist is the flights, the accommodation and the loss of production from them being away. So that's how we're solving it. Faster, better and more scalable.
- [06:35]
A
Yeah, yeah, definitely seems like it. Great to hear about how you've been able to scale the platform and all the different advantages that there are with simulation training. Can you go over some of the challenges they may come that may come with this type of training as well?
- [06:49]
B
The biggest challenges are that we are doing. We can't copy anyone. So because we are leading by, like, we're so many years ahead of anyone else in simulation training, we can't just go, oh, let's copy what someone else is doing, but do it better. We literally have to invent everything, including, how do you sell this, how do you communicate this to the market, how do you go to a DSO and show them this type of training that we do? So that's the most difficult challenge, is when you have to build everything from zero. I mean, it's good in that you have a huge head start on the rest of the world, but it is difficult. It's like being the bow of an icebreaker. You're always smashing into the ice as you break through. The other challenges are that we are doing something that's never been done before from a training point of view. We train more dentists, say in restorative dentistry. We run the largest continuum in the world now and then when we go into a dso, there's never been an organization that could scale up training so quickly and to such an extent. And so like our pipeline of dsos is like crazy. There's like we've gone from, I don't know, 15, 20 DSOs in our pipeline. Before I moved to America, we took us a year to get to about 20 and then it's taken us like two months to go to nearly 80. And so the demand is insane. But it's no longer an education problem at this scale. It's a change management problem. So the biggest challenge is you have to run a very refined change management process as you roll this out with a group. If you just sit there and your careless with your implementation. And about three years ago with one of our very first groups, we didn't know all of this. And you know, if you're careless with how you roll things out, you can get change management failure. Which the reason we're so, I guess the reason we put so much emphasis on it is we've seen how badly it can go if you don't put emphasis on it. So that's a big part of our skill set is understanding both the psychology of dentists and how you train them, but also the change management process of working with a large organization to roll it out so it actually works.
- [09:12]
A
Okay, yeah, super important. Thank you for sharing more about that. Moving on to another topic here, I'm also curious to know what are you most excited about when it comes to dentistry at this point and what makes you nervous about the industry?
- [09:25]
B
I think I'm excited with the pace of innovation. The thing that actually is exciting and scary is the same thing, the pace of innovation. Like there's tools coming out now that just make life so much easier and they make dentists so much more productive. The 3D printing techniques, the automated design software that takes scans and automatically designs the crowns or the onlays and things, the automated radiograph reading, all of these things are super exciting. I find it just so cool. I guess the thing that makes me nervous is one, how do you keep up with such. It's not just that the pace of innovation is accelerating exponentially and so just keeping up is actually getting more and more tiresome. And at some point in the near to long term future, we're going to need to start thinking about how do we integrate robotics into clinical work. And that's once again it's one of those things that's both exciting and kind of scary. Like it's, it's hard to visualize the speed of advancement in these areas. So yeah, I think technology and innovation is always A double edged sword, you know, it's, it's fantastic. It's kind of scary. But the new, the new dentist graduating in this environment, that's all they will ever do. So for them, it won't be scary, it'll just be normal.
- [10:59]
A
True. Yeah, that's a good point to make. And I know I've spoken to so many dental leaders previously about the risks that kind of come with not investing in new technology and not keeping pace. And as you said, it's advancing so quickly. So this is definitely an important issue in dentistry right now. But I know that there are a lot of dentists out there who are finding it hard to keep up with the pace of innovation, as you said. What do you think is challenging about keeping up? Is it just the amount that's, you know, out there? Is it the cost, the time, you know, the, the effort that it takes to, to train on these things? What can you tell me about that?
- [11:35]
B
I think it's just the effort more than any other thing. Like some of these programs are expensive. I mean, you know, a rule that I read in a book, it was like some sort of practice management book that I read when I was at dental school, and it said, you know, basically don't be first and don't be last. And I think that's a pretty good rule to follow. Like, there's a small percentage of people who just love to be cutting edge. But cutting edge is always very risky because you also find out all the things that don't work. So you don't want to be. For the average dentist, you don't need to be first. There's someone else who's happy to try things out and if they find that it works good on them, they get to be the tip of the spear and they can market to all their patients before anyone else can. But you definitely don't want to be last either. So let people try things out for a bit and then you start to get some sense. I think the thing that makes it hard is it's just tiring. Once upon a time you could learn something and then you could kind of put your feet up and chill for the next two or three years until they invented something new. Whereas now you have to continuously learn all of the time without stopping because there's so much new stuff. And so if you do that all the time, you kind of get fit. It's like if you go to the gym regularly, it's not so painful. But if you want to take some time off learning all of these new things, then the catch up period is going to be super hard. And then some people just kind of get stuck where they just can't catch up. So I think a little bit of effort all of the time solves a lot of these problems and just accept that it just doesn't go away. It's just you're just having a never ending torrent of new things coming at you forever and ever until you retire.
- [13:29]
A
All right, some good points that you make there. So thank you for sharing those. Last question for you here. What will the most effective healthcare leaders need to be successful in the next two to three years?
- [13:40]
B
So we get to work with a lot of healthcare leaders across so many organizations now. And there's two things that make we can tell. We can tell when a group has really good leaders. Like you can see it in the group very quickly if they have good leaders. And we can also tell if they're maybe a little bit challenged in the leadership department. So in healthcare in particular, you need an understanding of clinicians and clinician led business. So clinicians are not like normal corporate people or technology people. You can't treat them like that. They generally have a higher standard of what they think is right because of their oaths that they make when they graduate and also because they get ethics and putting the patient first drummed into their head from the day they start dental school. So I've seen people come from technology and big corporations and try and bring that big corporation attitude into dentistry and it's always a massive failure. So they need that clinician understanding, that clinician led approach. However, if they are a clinician, they need executive ability, executive function. And so what I see frequently in quite a few, say clinical directors or chief clinical officers is they understand the clinical bit, but they don't have executive function. And it's when you have both those things. So executive function, like just a simple thing like replying to your emails. Dentists are notorious for not reading their emails or replying to them. And if you go into a leadership position, then answering your emails is quite important. So you know that and then how to effectively communicate to people without just ordering them or using authority, which as a dentist you tend to do a lot, because in a clinical situation you don't have time to go through a whole communication process with your assistant if the patient's bleeding to death. So that is what we see is when you get someone who has good understanding of clinicians and amazing executive function, then that group is going to win. And if you lack either of those things then those groups tend to have EBITDA problems.
- [16:02]
A
All right, well, that is all I have for you today. Dr. Harris, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, and I look forward to connecting with you again in the future.
- [16:10]
B
Thank you so much for having me.