Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Dentist Lincoln Harris discusses his article, “How cloud-based simulation training is revolutionizing dentistry.” Drawing on his background as a pilot, Lincoln exposes the critical training gap in modern dentistry, arguing that dentists (unlike pilots) are not prepared for real-world, high-stress scenarios. He explains why traditional dental school and “weekend courses” fail to build the necessary muscle memory for advanced procedures, leading to mixed results and poor patient outcomes, especially in rural areas. Lincoln details how cloud-based simulation technology is changing the game, allowing dentists to practice procedures repeatedly and build confidence without risking patient safety. Learn how this aviation-inspired approach to dental training is creating more competent dentists and improving patient care everywhere.

Our presenting sponsor is Microsoft Dragon Copilot.

Microsoft Dragon Copilot, your AI assistant for clinical workflow, is transforming how clinicians work. Now you can streamline and customize documentation, surface information right at the point of care, and automate tasks with just a click.

Part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Dragon Copilot offers an extensible AI workspace and a single, integrated platform to help unlock new levels of efficiency. Plus, it’s backed by a proven track record and decades of clinical expertise, and it’s built on a foundation of trust.

It’s time to ease your administrative burdens and stay focused on what matters most with Dragon Copilot, your AI assistant for clinical workflow.

VISIT SPONSOR → https://aka.ms/kevinmd

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast

RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD → https://www.kevinmd.com/recommended

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi. Welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today, we welcome Lincoln Harris. He is a dentist, and today’s KevinMD article is “How cloud-based simulation training is revolutionizing dentistry.” Lincoln, welcome to the show.

Lincoln Harris: Kevin, thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.

Kevin Pho: Let’s start by briefly sharing your story, and then we will jump right into your KevinMD article.

Lincoln Harris: I was a dentist in Australia in a small rural village, and there were no specialists. For my patients to get specialist treatment, I had to go and learn it myself. I spent about six years flying backward and forward across the Pacific to the United States.

I developed skills in orthodontics, prosthodontics, and implant dentistry so my patients could get all of these treatments in the office. Then, other dentists started to ask me how I learned this and where I went. I would give them this big list of 20 courses I had been to, and at some point, it dawned on me that I could teach them myself.

I started training dentists in multiple procedures in about 2013. After about six years of that, I had requests all over the world, and I hit the limit on transporting bodies in planes. I thought we needed a better way to teach procedures that is scalable, more efficient, and even more effective.

There were two real breakthroughs. The first one was this: If we taught pilots the way we teach dentists, they would all be dead. Dentists do not do anywhere near enough repetitions in training at any stage, and they basically get sent out into the world to figure it out themselves even after they graduate.

That was probably number one: not enough repetitions. Probably number two is that dentistry is a global industry, and people want to learn from everyone, everywhere, all of the time. You just cannot fly that much. The limit, of course, was that I had no time. Then COVID-19 came, and I had time. I spent the COVID-19 pandemic developing simulation training, which was also slightly hastened by the fact that no one was flying at all.

We developed the mannequins, the software, and the method. We now teach dentists new procedures in 35 countries.

Kevin Pho: Tell us what that looks like. Obviously, I am a physician, not a dentist. In terms of what this simulation-based training would look like, you mentioned software and mannequins. Just give us a sense of what that looks like for non-dentists.

Lincoln Harris: Dentists at dental school learn their basic procedures on mannequins in simulation labs. They are big buildings full of fake heads that have plastic teeth. They practice repetitions on plastic teeth before they start to treat patients. However, the environment is super artificial, and they do not do enough repetitions. Once they graduate, it gets worse than that because they often get taught new procedures in a hotel conference room. You do not even have a head. You just have a set of teeth that you can pick up. You can drill from any angle because there are no cheeks, necks, or eyes in the way. Then, you have to go from that to implementing the procedure.

We want to do a simulation, and we want to make it as realistic as possible. First of all, for a dentist, we want them to train in their normal operatory with their normal equipment, their normal materials, their normal posture, and maybe even their normal staff.

Secondly, we obviously need something for them to practice on. You cannot practice things on a patient. We manufacture mannequins that are designed to sit on their chair. Then, we have developed training exercises to teach a variety of different skills. When they join a class, they do not join by location; they join by time zone.

All the people who are in the Americas can technically join. If they are on the East Coast, they can all join an Eastern Standard Time class. To give you an example of how this might look, we recently ran a class for 20 dentists between Michigan, New York City, and Florida, teaching them how to do crowns better.

I was teaching them from Colorado. I am from Australia, and the other teacher on the class is from Germany, but he was on sabbatical in Colombia. You had a dentist in Colombia and one in Colorado teaching 20 dentists who are sprinkled across the United States everywhere from Chicago to New York City to Florida. That is the power of what we do.

Kevin Pho: Logistically speaking, regarding the teachers like yourself, would they appear on screens? What would that look like for the trainees during this course?

Lincoln Harris: The method that we have right now found that if a dentist takes photographs of their work, uploads it, and then gets feedback on the photographs, it is far superior to the traditional method, which involves someone pointing at things with a pointer. In dental school, people lean over your shoulder and point at things. We figured that if you take a photograph and enlarge it to full screen, it is massively magnified. If you draw on it, the visualization of the problem is massively more obvious.

We know this because our research shows that dentists learn more than 50 percent faster with this method. You could use the method of uploading photographs in a simulation lab where you are sitting with them, but there is no point because once you are uploading photographs onto a screen, you can be anywhere in the world.

We developed that method. Of course, to run it, we have a global logistics and manufacturing part to the business. Then we have software engineers because you need specialized software to be able to run these courses.

Kevin Pho: You mentioned how to do crowns better. What kind of other dental procedures are you training these dentists to do using your simulation?

Lincoln Harris: We teach fillings, crowns, orthodontics, orthodontic implants, and implant dentistry. We will soon add root canal therapy, pediatrics, hygiene, and dental assisting. Pretty much if it is a procedure, this system is designed for it. The method and the system we have developed can be used to teach any procedure anywhere. Right now, I am focused on dentistry because I have not raised enough capital to go into other verticals.

Kevin Pho: What about outcomes in terms of the dentists that are being trained by your system? Are there any differences or improvements in terms of the outcomes and complications?

Lincoln Harris: The complication rate was actually one of the first inspirations to do this. After the very first course that we taught in 2013, we got a lot of dentists sending me pictures of their complications. This was in a traditional method, which almost every other educator uses. That includes a lot of didactics, a demonstration by an expert, and then maybe one or two repetitions done on something artificial, like a fake set of teeth or a pig’s jaw.

Initially, I was sitting there thinking about when I learned to fly. More importantly, when I learned to land a plane, we practiced that over and over again because otherwise, you would die. You cannot just do a lecture and one demonstration and then land a plane because you will die. It is the same when I learned to scuba dive. You have to do a lot of repetitions with things, otherwise, you die. However, in dentistry, the dentist does not die, so you can maybe be a bit more slack.

The outcomes improve dramatically when you make someone do 20 repetitions of something instead of one. Our implementation rates with this method show that dentists implement procedures at about four times the rate of a traditional method. These statistics are quite shocking for the implementation of new procedures. Roughly 15 to 18 percent of dentists will implement a new procedure after they go to a course.

Kevin Pho: You wrote in your article that sometimes the traditional dental establishment was not so receptive to this approach. Why do you think that is?

Lincoln Harris: It is different. I mean, it is not just different in the sense that you do not understand it. If you have not run this program for years, it is hard to visualize. It is also different in that building courses is actually a huge amount of work, particularly if they are accredited.

When you remove the constraints of time and place, you can build completely different educational pathways. That means you have to rewrite your entire curriculum. Obviously, no one is excited to do that. I do not even like writing a curriculum in the first place, let alone rewriting one. I can see why. Mostly, it is that people cannot visualize that an online simulation is better than what they would consider the gold standard of being in person.

Kevin Pho: In terms of the implementation and accessibility of a simulation like this, is it available worldwide? How easy is it to enroll in a class like this?

Lincoln Harris: We are obviously heavily focused on the United States, but we train dentists in 35 countries so far. We have dentists all through Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and that region, as well as a whole number of countries in Europe as long as they speak English. We are not multilingual yet. We are obviously all over the U.K. and then all across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.

What is interesting, of course, is that we built this to solve the problem of travel. What we have inadvertently solved is the problem of training surgical professionals at an enormous scale. In the United States right now, there are groups buying up dental practices to form dental service organizations, or DSOs, backed by private equity.

They are going crazy. There are 2,800 of these groups growing at 17 percent compounding. They are still only at about 30-something percent of the market, and they have no easily achievable way of training their dentists. When they employ a new dentist, they are actually not profitable. When you graduate, you actually are not productive enough, and you do not do procedures that are good enough to make a profit for the person who owns the clinic.

Basically, we now have an enormous demand problem. For four and a half or five years, we were building all of this. We had customers because you need them to test everything, but we were basically in research and development mode until the start of 2025 when I moved to the United States. Then we went: “OK, let’s fully invest in going to market.”

Now, suddenly, we have so much demand from large dental groups that we have a supply problem. At the moment, I am in the process of raising capital from investors mostly so we can build out our go-to-market strategy and just scale up all of our systems and processes because the demand is insatiable. It is incredible.

Kevin Pho: In terms of a cost standpoint, what is the cost of running these simulations versus the traditional method of training dentists?

Lincoln Harris: The all-in cost is about one quarter. The biggest cost with a graduated surgeon, physician, or anyone who earns a high income is the loss of income. If you fly a whole bunch of dentists to an institute, the biggest cost is that they lose an extra day of travel, which is a day of earning money. That is number one.

Then, of course, you have flights, accommodation, and all those sorts of things. Also, we do not have a massive 100,000-square-foot institute to pay for. Our capital cost is much lower. All in, it is about one quarter of the cost. When you combine a quarter of the cost with four times the implementation rate, the return on investment for people who are paying for this is extraordinary. That is why the demand has gone crazy.

Kevin Pho: Now, what do you see as the path forward? Do you eventually see dental schools using some of this cloud-based simulation in terms of the traditional method of education? Where do you see yourself in this technology in the foreseeable future?

Lincoln Harris: That is a great question. There are two paths that we are focusing on at the moment. Right now, obviously, we are scaling up the go-to-market strategy, but the future product mix is, number one, to get the whole platform able to be used by any educator in the world.

Right now, we have built this whole platform that we use exclusively for ourselves. However, people all over the world reach out to me and ask if they can use it because they get sick of flying too. At some point, when you start flying around the world, it is exciting, but after a few years of it, it is less exciting.

I had a conversation with a dental school just yesterday. Basically, their buildings are maxed out. They are in the middle of a very expensive city in the United States. They cannot expand easily without it costing hundreds of millions of dollars. They want to train more dentists from overseas. They want to have their overseas dentists more aligned to a quality standard before they turn up in the United States. They have all of these problems, and basically, they are saying that they are trying to work out what to do with it. You have literally solved that.

I think at some point we will end up in the vast majority of dental schools in the world. Obviously, that is just for the simulation part. We have just patented sensor-enabled mannequins, so you are getting real-time data from the dentist’s hand and from the teeth while they are practicing.

We have data stored from the last five years of training. From an AI point of view, our AI focus is to take this huge collection of data and start to automate a lot of these feedback processes. We can either get the cost down enough to go into lower-cost markets like India, or we can build an enormous data set on why dentists do things. Once they get in the clinic, there is all this AI that tells you what they do. However, we can tell you why because we can understand all of their learning triggers, their speed of implementation, and their hand efficiency metrics. Those hand efficiency metrics can roll across any type of surgery. We essentially have built a platform that scales up and allows us to collect some of the most useful data that you can ever get from a person who does procedures.

Kevin Pho: We are talking to Lincoln Harris. He is a dentist. Today’s KevinMD article is “How cloud-based simulation training is revolutionizing dentistry.” Lincoln, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Lincoln Harris: I think that the number one message I would like to leave people with is that experience and repetitions in an evidence-based world still matter a great deal. Everyone who has ever been on a plane wants their pilot to have thousands of hours of experience, not just to have read a thousand papers.

Kevin Pho: Lincoln, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Lincoln Harris: Thanks for having me, Kevin. I appreciate it.