Building The field
Every clinical field that now feels routine was once where bone health is today.
Blood pressure management, diabetes care, mammography screening, cardiovascular risk prevention. None of these felt inevitable when they were being built. They feel inevitable now because the systems behind them have worked long enough that most clinicians have never practiced without them. Risk gets identified. Competency gets defined. Information moves through the system. Outcomes get measured. The infrastructure is invisible because it works.
Bone health has the science. It has the pharmacological tools. It has decades of research demonstrating that fragility fractures are preventable, that bone health risk is identifiable before fracture occurs, and that earlier intervention produces better outcomes at lower cost.
What bone health has not yet built is the layer that makes science actionable at scale. The trained, credentialed workforce that can recognize risk across the lifespan. The measurement infrastructure that makes that workforce visible and countable. The shared competency standards that allow bone health care to function consistently regardless of setting, specialty, or credential level.
This is what ASOP is building.
The content on this page represents ASOP’s public thinking about what that build requires and why it matters, organized around the three components of ASOP’s mission: to recognize bone health risk, to support the workforce that manages it, and to define the standards that make management consistent across the field.
This is a living body of work. New content will be added as the field develops and as ASOP’s initiatives mature. The newsletter carries the ongoing narrative. The resources here are the permanent record.
RECOGNIZE
Making bone health risk visible at the field level
Before bone health can be managed systematically, it first has to be seen. That requires measurement infrastructure that does not yet exist at scale: a way to identify patients at risk before a fracture occurs, a way to distinguish fragility fractures from trauma fractures in claims data, and a way to count and credential the workforce responsible for addressing that risk.
The following resources make the case for why that infrastructure is necessary and what building it requires.
A Field That Can’t See Itself
A three-part series on the measurement infrastructure bone health has never had. Written for clinicians, health system leaders, industry partners, and payers.
Part 1: A Field That Can’t See Itself - Counting by Proxy | July 2026
Part 2 | Coming August 2026
Part 3 | Coming September 2026
From Crisis to Continuum - white paper
A formal examination of how cardiology and diabetes moved from event-triggered care to risk-based prevention, and what bone health must now build. Includes how women's health built programs that scale, sustain, and create longitudinal value. Written for health systems, funders, and policy audiences.
sUPPORT
Building the human capacity to act on what the field can see
Bone health care fails at the point of delivery not because the science is absent but because the clinical training was never standardized. Most clinicians who regularly encounter bone health risk received little formal training in it. No shared competency standard defines what they should know, how it should be assessed, or who holds it.
ASOP is building that standard, and developing the educational content that allows any clinician, across any specialty or credential level, to close the gap between what their training provided and what contemporary bone health care requires.
Rare Bone Disease: A Clinical Recognition Series
Most clinicians who encounter a patient with a rare bone disease don’t know they’re encountering one. The presentations are unfamiliar, the genetics are complex, and formal training rarely covered the territory. The result is years of diagnostic delay for patients who needed a different path much earlier.
This video series was built around a simple premise: a clinician doesn’t need to be a specialist to recognize that something is wrong, identify the general category of concern, and know where to send the patient next. Twelve modules covering basic genetics, major rare bone disease categories, clinical characteristics, and the transition from pediatric to adult care, developed by a world leader in the field, designed for any bone health or non-bone health provider in clinical practice who suspects a problem and needs a place to start.
Available September 2026.
The Founders Forum
Measurement tells us what is happening. Conversations with the people doing the work help us understand why.
The Founders Forum is a working conversation, led by the providers and open to the bone health ecosystem around them. It exists so the people who see the most, and are heard the least, can help set the direction of the field. It begins as small, curated groups, intentionally intimate, because the conversation has to be real.
If you are doing this work and have something to say about where it should go, this is the room.
Stay Connected
ASOP’s newsletter carries the ongoing narrative of this build. New series installments, updates on the certification framework, and substantive thinking about what it takes to transform bone health care at scale. Published monthly.