PITTSBURGH, Aug. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- CECity.com, Inc. (CECity), National Bone Health Alliance (NBHA), and National Osteoporosis Foundation (NOF) – the Bone Health Collaborative – announced today the selection of several key organizations for the Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) Demonstration Project. These organizations include three leading academic medical centers in osteoporotic patient care. The FLS Demonstration Project, announced in December 2013, was made possible thanks to funding from Merck.
National Bone Health Alliance. (PRNewsFoto/CECity) (PRNewsFoto/CECITY)
The academic medical centers selected include: Alegent Creighton Health (Omaha, NE; Site Lead: Dr. Robert Recker); MedStar Georgetown University Hospital (Washington, DC; Site Lead: Dr. Andrea Singer); and UPMC (Pittsburgh, PA; Site Lead: Dr. Susan Greenspan). These sites were chosen from a pool of over 192 organizations.
These academic medical centers will utilize the CECity MedConcert® cloud-based technology platform to scale the FLS model of care and enable care coordination to support health care professionals treating osteoporosis-related fracture patients.
"CECity is excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with Alegent Creighton Health, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and UPMC to improve outcomes for their patients with osteoporosis," said Simone Karp, RPh, co-founder, chief business officer, CECity. "MedConcert was designed to scale performance improvement by developing registry-based tools for quality improvement and population health management that allow providers to connect across communities, regardless of their practice setting. The FLS Demonstration Study represents an opportunity to collaborate with three leading academic medical centers to combine proven best practices in clinical care, with new cloud technology, to assess the ability to accelerate and spread community-wide quality improvement."
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. It currently costs $19 billion annually to treat fractures among seniors (a figure projected to increase to over $25 billion by the year 2025), yet the majority of patients are released without being evaluated for osteoporosis — the underlying disease which may have led to the fracture.
"FLS programs in the U.S. and abroad have cost effectively reduced the number of expensive and serious recurrent fractures by identifying and appropriately treating post-fracture patients, recognizing that this group of patients has the highest risk of future fractures," said David Lee, executive director, NBHA. "The goal of this project is to determine how rapidly FLS programs can be established to help drive quality improvement and prevent broken bones and the patient pain and suffering they cause."
One of the key difficulties in osteoporosis and post-fracture patient care is the fragmented U.S. health care system, which makes it challenging to coordinate patient care across hospitals, medical offices, and multiple medical specialties in the community.
The FLS Demonstration Project is designed to provide participating hospitals with the FLS model of care to assess the impact on patient care and hospitals' adoption and implementation of a FLS across their communities. At each site, a fracture liaison coordinator will identify fracture patients and coordinate appropriate post-fracture care, in order to reduce the chances of future fractures – using CECity's MedConcert platform and the FLS application, which includes a patient registry and care coordination application.
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