Any Provider.
any Specialty.
One Knowledge Standard.
Managing Risk Before the Fracture.
ASOP is building the workforce pipeline and infrastructure to recognize, support, and manage bone health risk across the lifespan.
Treated Everywhere. Built Nowhere.
Bone health is treated in orthopedics, endocrinology, rheumatology, primary care, and women's health, by physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners. Every one of those specialties has a society. Inside every one of them, bone health is a secondary concern competing against that group's central interest. No one is positioned to own it.
So the field cannot count the fractures it exists to prevent in the data that drives policy, cannot say who is qualified to manage the risk, and cannot measure whether anything it does is working.
What ASOP is Building
Pillar 1 - Count the event
A fracture from a fall at standing height and a fracture from a highway collision carry the same code. One is a warning. The other is an accident. The record cannot tell them apart, so the field cannot count the fractures that signal risk. ASOP is working through the federal process that maintains those codes, with two proposals that would capture the difference. Nothing new has to be observed. There has never been a place to put it.
Pillar 2 - Define the provider
ASOP is curating the body of knowledge a provider should possess before sitting in front of a patient, and building a certification process that validates it. From there, the field can count its certified providers and size their impact.
Pillar 3 - Size the burden
This is the natural result of the first two pillars. A count of the at-risk population. The size of the provider base treating it. And how fragility fracture develops across a life, which this field has only ever inferred, from age fifty forward, in women, when they fracture. This is what future policy and resource decisions for bone health in the United States will rest on.