There is certainly no end of demand for health and human services right now. Given this situation, you would think that health care provider organizations would be in great strategic and financial position. But that is not the case. In this issue of the OPEN MINDS Management Newsletter, we present a thorough “how to” guide for conducting a market-focused service line portfolio analysis to help executive teams make tough decisions about the service lines that have the greatest sustainability for their organizations.

Service line portfolio analysis—and good market intelligence—aids your executive team in making decisions about what type of investment to make in your current service lines and which new service lines you can offer to complement your current portfolio and for which there is a market need. It also pinpoints the service lines that are worth sustaining and which should be considered for closure.

This article focuses on the matrix tools useful for advancing the discussion of service line strategy, including profitability, market risk-reward ratio, and service diversification—advanced tools for ongoing portfolio management. While there are many matrix models that can be used, the four views of service line data that we use most often are the Mission-Profitability Matrix; the Market Growth-Market Share Matrix; the Risk-Reward Matrix; and the Diversification-Risk Matrix.