Identifying Portfolio Opportunities in Primary Care
A major medical device organization needed to understand how changing patient needs, clinical workflows, and care-delivery models should influence the future of its primary care portfolio.
I led a multi-site opportunity discovery engagement across six care environments, helping more than 20 stakeholders move beyond individual devices toward a systems-level view of future opportunity.
The work helped leadership prioritize future product and service investments and informed a multi-million-dollar primary care portfolio strategy.
Keywords: Portfolio Strategy · Opportunity Identification · Systems Thinking · Clinical Workflow · Opportunity Prioritization · Investment Decision Support
Project Info
Client: A Major Medical Device Manufacturer
Time: 2024, 10 Months
Role: Engagement Lead, Strategist, Principal Investigator
Project Overview
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We began by bringing together more than twenty stakeholders to understand the business, clarify innovation priorities, and identify the questions that needed to be answered before future portfolio investments could be made.
I guided stakeholder discussions, document reviews, and collaborative sessions to surface existing assumptions and build alignment around the most important unknowns.
A central strategic question emerged: rather than focusing only on how individual devices could improve, where were changing models of primary care creating broader opportunities for the portfolio?
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I directed contextual discovery across six care environments spanning primary care, urgent care, pediatrics, and community health.
The team examined how care was actually delivered and how products, workflows, organizational structures, providers, staff, and patients interacted.
This systems-level perspective allowed us to look beyond individual device interactions and understand the broader realities reshaping primary care, particularly the increasing complexity of managing chronic conditions over time.
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I guided the team in turning a large body of observational and stakeholder evidence into a clearer picture of the needs, tensions, and emerging patterns affecting primary care.
Rather than treating pain points as isolated product problems, we examined how coordination, workflow pressures, patient engagement, technology, and organizational structures interacted across the care journey.
We translated that complexity into an experience framework and opportunity model that highlighted where product, service, and system-level innovation could create greater value.
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I worked with stakeholders across the client organization to connect the emerging opportunities to portfolio priorities and identify areas most worthy of continued investment.
The framework became a foundation for cross-functional ideation and subsequent development work, helping the organization move from isolated product opportunities toward a broader view of how its primary care portfolio could evolve.
The engagement ultimately gave leadership greater clarity about where emerging needs were creating strategic opportunity and helped inform a multi-million-dollar portfolio strategy.
Key Takeaways
Looking Beyond the Device
One of the most important shifts was recognizing that the future of primary care could not be understood by evaluating individual devices in isolation.
Products existed within a larger system of patient relationships, clinical workflows, staffing models, technology, and long-term disease management.
This broadened the strategic conversation from improving individual products toward determining where the organization could better support care delivery across its portfolio.
Designing for Long-Term Care
Primary care is increasingly shaped by the ongoing management of chronic conditions rather than isolated episodes of treatment.
Care coordination, patient engagement, workflow burden, and continuity created needs extending across individual visits and products.
This helped the organization identify opportunities to orient future products and services around the longer-term realities of how patients and care teams manage health over time.
Challenges
Creating Alignment at Scale
The engagement involved more than twenty stakeholders with different responsibilities, priorities, and perspectives on the future of the business.
I maintained active engagement across that group while creating opportunities for stakeholders to contribute expertise, challenge emerging interpretations, and build shared ownership around the resulting opportunities.
That alignment was essential to moving the work beyond the immediate project team and into broader portfolio decisions.
Maintaining Momentum Through a Long Field Period
Recruitment across six clinic sites extended over several months and created a risk of losing momentum and exhausting resources.
I structured the engagement so the team synthesized evidence as it emerged, allowing us to pause between sites without losing continuity or carrying unnecessary staffing costs.
That approach kept the work within budget while allowing our strategic understanding to progressively deepen as new care environments were added.