Press Release

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

U.S. Small Business Uses OPIC Loan to Expand Health Care Network in Poland

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A U.S. small business will use a loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to help one of Poland’s largest networks of private health care clinics expand, providing increasing numbers of Polish citizens access to high-quality health care at affordable prices, OPIC President and CEO Robert Mosbacher, Jr. announced today.

OPIC will provide a $5.5 million loan to Medycyna Rodzinna S.A. (MR), so that it can construct new facilities, improve existing ones, purchase medical equipment, acquire and improve smaller clinics in outer regions of Poland, and develop of a first-class hub clinic in Warsaw which would be able to conduct specialist and diagnostic testing as well as provide more complicated treatments.

MR, established in 1998 by a group of Polish doctors seeking to improve health care standards in the country, owns 16 clinics and five small corporate ambulatories in the nine largest cities in Poland, seven of them in Warsaw. The company has over 900 employees that serve 270,000 patients, who receive approximately 800,000 consultations per year.

MR provides free and equal access for everyone to its primary care services. It also provides occupational medicine to employees and pre-paid medical services for employees and their families. It serves patients within public national health insurance as well as those with additional private health plans – a growing market in Poland.

MR has developed a communications network which connects all of its clinics, and maintains detailed records of customer medical information, billing information, and insurance. The system enables up-to-date patient care information to ensure accuracy of invoicing, as well as effective patient care.

The company is owned largely by the Polish Enterprise Fund (PEF), a U.S.-based venture capital investment fund formed to make investments in Poland.

Mosbacher noted that MR has contributed importantly to Poland’s efforts to overcome poor-quality health care, which until the late 1990s lacked adequate diagnostic and testing equipment. Legislation in 1999 enabled Poland’s National Health Fund, the public entity responsible for payment for health services for all citizens, to contract with private providers to provide health care services.

“Provision of affordable, high-quality health care for all of Poland’s citizens is MR’s goal, which, the company has demonstrated, can be achieved on profitable basis. OPIC’s loan will enable MR to expand its health care services to an even greater numbers of Poles. This will result in both social and economic benefits as there will be both a healthier population and a citizenry better informed about preventative care,” Mosbacher said. “OPIC is pleased to support a U.S. small business in such a worthy project.”