Landmark discoveries in Amgen-sponsored report on bone health

The Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU) has published its latest report on bone health, sponsored by Amgen EU. Integrated Care Pathways for Bone Health: An Overview of Global Policies examines poor bone health, and the steps we can take to prevent them using integrated care pathways.

We are living longer, but that does not always mean healthier lives. The latest findings from The EIU suggest that an integrated care pathway for bone health can build more resilient healthcare systems by helping to ensure the prevention of disease or at least catching it early to enable steps to be taken to promote future wellbeing.

Key findings from the report

The EIU report seeks to reframe attention on bone health as an intentional effort. By helping stakeholders to see that steps can be taken to improve bone health, we can take a more action-oriented approach to health systems and society.

This report focuses specifically on the benefits of integrated care pathways, a common frame of reference for chronic diseases, and applies the existing World Health Organization Framework on People-Centered Health Services. Among the findings, The EIU reported:

Primary and secondary care providers need better access to tools and knowledge concerning bone health.

While there are guidelines for bone health, few of these speak to the specific needs of primary care providers. As these are often an individual’s first point of contact, these care providers have a crucial influence over their patients’ long-term health.

There is no clinical specialty dedicated solely to bone health. We need to build multi-disciplinary teams to deliver better care, calling on the skills of both clinical environment specialists and public health or social services teams.

Risk assessment tools can help to strengthen primary care.

This puts more emphasis on the importance of risk assessment tools such as the FRAX® tool, which can be easily implemented in primary care and is currently available in 73 countries. However, it’s important to note that both risk assessment and data collection are meaningless if physicians cannot include bone health assessments in their primary care.

With life expectancy around the world rising, the burden of poor bone health rises in unison. Many diseases compete for prioritisation in the race to support healthy ageing, but addressing bone health is the most important way to preserve mobility for ageing populations. Poor bone health encompasses a broad spectrum of diseases, but it is most often quantified as the cumulative burden of osteoporosis and osteoporosis-related fractures.

Over 200 million people are estimated to be affected by osteoporosis globally: 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men aged 50 years or more will suffer an osteoporotic fracture during their remaining lifetime. Osteoporotic fractures (or osteoporosis-related fractures) are fractures resulting from an injury that would not typically break a normal, healthy bone. Osteoporotic fractures are one of the largest contributors to the burden of chronic conditions. Taking action following an initial fracture is paramount: a previous fracture doubles the risk of an additional fracture.

Poor bone health later in life is not inevitable.

An ageing population puts the biggest strain on the healthcare system, not just in terms of treatment costs, but in terms of retirees putting less back into the system. But osteoporosis does not solely affect older people. Some 7.6 million osteoporosis-related sick days were taken in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom in 2017.

The financial costs to health systems are not the only costs to consider. The informal provision of care by family and friends stepping in to assist is difficult to quantify yet is widely acknowledged to be a significant financial burden on both families and employers.

Calls to action from the report

The EIU’s findings have galvanized five ‘calls to action’ for healthcare providers worldwide, centered around better referrals, multi-disciplinary healthcare, and greater awareness. Specifically:

1. Care providers should re-orient their services to include patient risk assessments and better bone health literacy.
2. Improve the coordination of services between primary and secondary care.
3. Targeted campaigns to empower and engage the general public and improve health literacy.
4. Healthcare systems should strengthen governance and accountability by developing clinical leadership, and defining bone health outcomes for use in primary and secondary care to measure the quality of care delivered to patients.
5. Create an enabling environment by training health professionals to improve outcomes in bone health, in particular primary care providers and nurses and improving both diagnostic and treatment capabilities.

The report has highlighted the immense strain that an ageing population will have on healthcare systems in the coming years. Old age dependency ratios (where individuals reach 65 years old or more) are expected to rise to as high as 50% in some regions by 2050. By 2025, the cost of osteoporotic fractures in the EU is expected to climb to more than €48 billion.

By implementing better policies today, we can reduce financial and resource pressures. The World Health Organization introduced its Decade of Healthy Ageing in 2021: a global collaborative effort to achieve tangible outcomes for integrated care.  At Amgen, we are proud to have sponsored The EIU’s report and look forward to maximizing the opportunities for improvement in the coming years.

This is an example of our report writing and white paper services. Get in touch to find out more.