Bone Health Collaborative Forms to Implement Fracture Liaison Service Demonstration Study

Several national organizations that focus on bone health are collaborating to launch a Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) Demonstration Study hoped to provide participating hospitals with the FLS model of care. Fracture Liaison Services are coordinator-based, secondary fracture prevention services implemented by health care systems for the treatment of osteoporotic patients. The study is led by the National Bone Health Alliance (NBHA), National Osteoporosis Foundation (NOF) and CECity.com Inc. (CECity)—together known as the Bone Health Collaborative. The study is funded by Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Inc.

Despite 15 years of documented international success of the FLS model of post-fracture care to identify patients at risk in order to prevent costly and deadly secondary fractures in patients with osteoporosis, relatively few hospitals have successfully implemented this approach as a standard of care in the United States. The participating organizations are experts in osteoporosis patient care quality improvement research, population health management and care coordination technology, and they expect to use the study to discover how to change that trend.

“With osteoporosis causing an estimated two million broken bones per year at an estimated direct cost of $19 billion, we know osteoporosis-related bone breaks are responsible for significant human and financial costs,” said Robert Recker, M.D., MACP, FACE, co-chair of NBHA, president of NOF and director of the Osteoporosis Research Center at Creighton University, Omaha, Neb. “There has never been a greater need for effective post-fracture prevention and care coordination programs. These programs are the key to sparing many Americans from the pain, suffering and reduced quality of life associated with broken bones, while at the same time producing enormous cost savings for the healthcare system.”

According to the Bone Health Collaborative, one of the key difficulties in osteoporosis and post-fracture patient care is the fragmented U.S. healthcare system, which makes it difficult to coordinate patient care across hospitals, medical offices and multiple medical specialties in the community. Only 23 percent of women over age 67 who have suffered a hip or other type of fracture are tested or treated for osteoporosis, and 25 percent of patients who break their hip die within the first year. Medicare spends more than $5 billion annually to treat fractures among seniors, yet the majority of patients are released without being evaluated for osteoporosis—the underlying disease which may have led to the fracture.

The FLS Demonstration Study will leverage the experience and resources of each partner including NBHA’s fracture prevention knowledge and expertise; NOF’s expertise as the leading osteoporosis and bone health organization representing patients and healthcare professionals; and CECity’s Medconcert performance improvement platform, to engage providers in breaking down walls in order to build innovative communities of practice designed to improve the safety and quality of patient care.

“We developed Medconcert to scale performance improvement by offering cost-effective tools for population health management, rapid cycle learning and communications that allow providers to connect across communities, regardless of their practice setting,” said Simone Karp, RPh, co-founder and chief business development officer of CECity. “The FLS Demonstration Study represents that perfect opportunity to combine proven best-practices in clinical care, with best-of-breed cloud technology, to assess the ability to accelerate and spread community-wide quality improvement,” “We appreciate Merck’s dedication to the study of improving the quality of patient care, and we are excited to be partnering with NBHA and NOF to help improve outcomes for patients with osteoporosis.”

The study will begin in early 2014 and run for approximately 12 months within the three initial sites selected for the study. The partners expect to publish results of the study by mid-2015.

“This demonstration project will advance the science of chronic disease management,” said Sachin Jain, M.D., Merck’s chief medical information and innovation officer. “By helping us scale Fracture Liaison Services and other chronic care programs, we will help delivery systems achieve better clinical results for their patients.”