American Society of Osteoporosis Providers
Edition 6
June 10, 2026
Every clinician inherits systems they did not build.
Blood pressure is measured routinely. A1C is universally understood. Mammography follows established pathways. Referral patterns, treatment thresholds, and quality measures exist because generations before us built the systems that transformed scientific knowledge into everyday clinical practice.
Bone health has made enormous scientific advances. What remains unfinished is the work of building the systems that make those advances visible, measurable, and actionable across healthcare.
That is the work ASOP was built to do. And this month, we want to tell you exactly how we think about it, who we are, and where we are going.
ASOP has just approved a new mission statement. Not because the work changed. Because the language finally caught up to it. Here's what it says, what each word means, and why it matters to you.
ASOP's mission is to build the workforce pipeline and infrastructure to recognize, support, and manage bone health risk across the lifespan.
Each of those words was chosen deliberately because today, all three depend on local effort rather than reproducible systems.
Recognize: there is no systematic, field-wide mechanism to identify patients at risk of fracture before a fracture occurs.
Support: bone health CME exists and is widely available. What has never existed is a structured, credential-bearing pathway that builds genuine clinical competency rather than just accumulating hours.
No shared standard defines what competency should look like, who holds it, or how it is assessed across the specialties and provider types that routinely encounter bone health risk.
Manage: there has not been a reproducible way to identify patients who need to be seen, connect them with a clinician who can treat them appropriately, and follow their progress over the course of their lives. When the clinician leaves, the program leaves with them.
It's hard to know what you don't know.
That's what workforce and infrastructure mean in practice. Not organizational language. A description of what's absent.
A field matures when it can identify the patients it serves, the providers delivering care, and whether its work is improving outcomes.
And before any of those three things can be built, the field has to be able to answer five questions:
1. How many providers engage meaningfully in bone health care?
2. What do they actually know?
3. How many fragility fractures occur each year, and at what points across the lifespan?
4. How many of those patients receive treatment for the underlying disease?
5. What is the true size of the population whose bone health risk warrants clinical attention, not just at the point of fracture, but at every stage of life where that risk is present and manageable?
No one can answer any of these questions reliably today. That is where the work has to start.
We began by looking at how other fields got there.
From Crisis to Continuum
Cardiology once organized itself around the heart attack. Diabetes care was once organized around uncontrolled blood sugar levels. Bone health still largely organizes itself around the fracture.
The Fracture Liaison Service model was a genuine advance. It created a systematic framework for identifying high-risk patients who had recently sustained a fragility fracture, linking them to assessment and treatment. It demonstrated that coordinated bone health care was operationally feasible inside health systems. The challenge now is extending those gains beyond individual programs into reproducible systems.
It also has a known failure mode that anyone in bone health recognizes: when the clinical champion leaves, the program leaves with them. That is not a criticism of the model. It is a description of what happens when a good clinical program exists without the infrastructure to sustain it.
Infrastructure is what makes clinical knowledge durable. It is the standardized training that means any qualified provider can step in. The credentialing system that defines what qualified means. The operational frameworks that keep the program running when personnel change. The measurement systems that demonstrate the program's value to the institution when no champion is present to advocate for it.
The mature fields built that infrastructure. Bone health largely has not.
ASOP's white paper examines how cardiology and diabetes built their infrastructure, and what bone health must now construct.
A Field That Can't See Itself | Coming July
Every clinician who has tried to build a bone health program, standardize osteoporosis care, or learn enough to care for these patients has encountered the same problem: much of the infrastructure that supports other mature areas of medicine does not exist in bone health.
That absence shows up in three places simultaneously: in the patients the field cannot identify before fracture, in the fractures it cannot distinguish in claims data, and in the providers whose competency has never been defined by a shared field-wide standard.
These are not three separate problems.
They are the same structural absence at three points in the care chain.
Part 1 of a three-part series launches next month. The full series, along with the white paper, lives at ASOP's new resource hub.
→ Explore the Building the Field hub
Part 1: July 2026 | Part 2: August 2026 | Part 3: September 2026
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