Grameen Health to Establish Independent Collaborations with Pfizer, GE Healthcare, and Mayo Clinic to Create Sustainable Healthcare Delivery Models for the Developing World

Business Wire, Sept 24, 2008

"Mayo Clinic and Grameen are exploring opportunities where our organizations can work collaboratively based on the junction of our missions and strategic priorities," said Denis Cortese, M.D., president & CEO, Mayo Clinic. "These opportunities range from new methods of delivering care and dissemination of knowledge and best practices to education, clinical research and the use of new technology in non-traditional settings. Our two organizations are working diligently to find the opportunities that will have the best likelihood of improving health care delivery in developing countries."

Professor Yunus adds: "Improving health care access and quality worldwide is a huge and long-term project. We would like to invite other partners and thought leaders to join in on the collaboration with Grameen Health, or to create their own social health care business models and share the results with us."

About Pfizer

Pfizer is the world's largest research-based biomedical and pharmaceutical company, with 85,000 colleagues operating in more than 150 countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly one-third of the molecules on its "Essential Medicines List" are Pfizer medicines. For more information about Pfizer, visit www.pfizer.com.

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that help clinicians around the world with new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease. GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enables health care providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. GE Healthcare's vision is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit www.gehealthcare.com

About Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group practice in the world. Doctors from every medical specialty work together to care for patients, joined by common systems and a "patient first" philosophy. More than 3,300 physicians, scientists and researchers and 46,000 allied health staff work at Mayo Clinic, which has sites in Rochester, Minn., Jacksonville, Fla., and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz. Collectively, the three locations treat more than half a million people each year. For more information about Mayo Clinic, visit www.mayoclinic.com

About Grameen Health

Grameen Health (GH) aims to extend the success of the microfinance model to health care by designing and developing a bottom-up health care infrastructure built from sustainable best practices in a broad range of health care services around the world, and improving upon them to deliver the highest quality health care in an efficient and sustainable manner for a broad market, including the poorest of the poor. GH will enable the poor to be self sufficient in addressing their health care needs such that they can accept, but not require, outside assistance.