American Society of Osteoporosis Providers
Edition 7
July 7, 2026
Last month, we explored why bone health needs infrastructure. This month, we begin examining the problems that infrastructure has to solve.
Everything ASOP does comes back to one purpose: building the workforce pipeline and the infrastructure that lets bone health providers succeed at treating patients. Not advancing an agenda. Not adding another voice to a crowded room. Building the things the people doing this work actually need. If you are new here, our white paper, From Crisis to Continuum, lays out the case in full and is available on the hub.
Our three-part series, A Field That Can't See Itself, starts now. It is about a problem most clinicians feel, but few have the language for: bone health cannot reliably measure its own patients, its own fractures, or its own workforce, and a field that cannot see itself cannot prove it is working. Part 1 begins where the problem begins, with counting.
Part 1 of 3: Counting by Proxy
Imagine a population that was never counted in any census. The people are real. They live somewhere, they work, they raise families. But because no one ever measured them, they are invisible to every system built to serve a population. They cannot be planned for. They cannot be studied.
That is the position bone health is in today. The patients are real. The fractures are real. The providers are real. But the field has never been able to count any of them directly. It estimates them instead, using proxies, stand-in measures that approximate something you cannot measure directly. And in bone health, the proxies do not hold.
Fragility fractures get estimated by filtering claims data for age, fracture site, or an osteoporosis diagnosis, and each workaround fails in a different direction. The result is that published estimates of how many occur each year vary by a factor of two or more, not because the biology is mysterious, but because the counting method is. The provider side is worse, because it decays in real time. A membership roster is wrong within months, and underneath that, the field has never even defined what a qualified bone health provider is.
A field that cannot see itself cannot make its case to the people who fund research, set policy, and decide which conditions get attention.
This installment lays out the full picture: the fractures the field cannot count, the providers it cannot count, and why an unstable number is worse than no number at all. It is the foundation on which the rest of the series builds.
Next month, we will follow the information from the clinical record into the administrative systems that shape what healthcare can measure, and watch where it disappears.
Part 2: August | Part 3: September
Introducing the ASOP Founders Forum
Measurement tells us what is happening. Conversations with the people doing the work help us understand why.
The people closest to bone health care see things no one else does. They know where the real obstacles are, because they hit them every day. They have ideas about what would actually move the field forward, because they live in the gap between what should happen and what does. And almost none of that insight has ever had a place to go. The direction of the field gets shaped in rooms that the front line is rarely in.
The Founders Forum is being built to change that. It is a working conversation, led by the providers and open to the bone health ecosystem around them, the clinicians, program builders, educators, and others who engage with the real work of caring for these patients. It exists for one reason: so the people who see the most, and are heard the least, can help set the direction of the field.
This is ASOP's mission in action. We are here for providers, to help them succeed in treating patients. The Forum is where that commitment becomes real people, real direction, led by the ones who matter most and are too often overlooked. The questions we are asking are simple, and they are yours to answer:
1. What do you see, in your own practice and across the wider bone health landscape, that others miss?
2. How does it restrict or impact the work you do?
3. What should bone health look like five years from now?
The Forum begins as small, curated, intentionally intimate groups because the conversation has to be real. This is not a coalition to join or an audience to sit in. It is a room to contribute to. If you want to be part of one, reach out.
A larger quarterly convening is coming this fall. More on that soon.
The Conversation Continues Between Issues
This newsletter is one part of a larger conversation. Each week on LinkedIn, ASOP goes deeper: Systems Monday on how bone health care actually works and where it breaks down, and Literature Thursday on what the evidence says and what it does not. The full series and the white paper are live on the hub, where new work is added as it is published.
This Only Works If the Right People Are Involved
Every standard that exists in healthcare today was created because a group of people decided it was worth building. Bone health is at that moment.
ASOP is actively building committees to define how bone health will be delivered in the future: certification standards, assessment frameworks, and the question development and validation process that determines what clinical competency in bone health actually means.
This is not passive membership. This is an opportunity to directly shape the standards your field will use, before they are set.
Building these standards requires the people who have actually delivered bone health care, not just observed it from a distance. If that describes you, this is where that experience becomes useful beyond your own practice.
We are focused on full membership for those who want to help build this work, not just receive it.
ASOP is building the workforce pipeline and infrastructure to recognize, support, and manage bone health risk across the lifespan, aligned with science and standards, independent of products and platforms, and focused on the full arc of patient care.
Best Regards,
Dudley Phipps
CEO/Executive Director