GIANTS PRESIDENT JOHN MARAMara:Thank you Bruce. I'm very pleased to be here today to announce our new partnership with Quest Diagnostics. Quest, as you saw in the video, is the world's leading provider of laboratory diagnostic services that patients and doctors rely upon to make better health care decisions. As of today, our headquarters will be known as the Quest Diagnostics Training Center. The Giants will collaborate and consult with Quest to develop new sports diagnostics services. Our aim is to assist Quest in identifying and developing models and tests to help determine peak performance, provide meaningful training insights, reduce injuries and improve players' overall health. Quest will offer these services through its newly formed sports diagnostic business. Each year, a select group of Giants players will be given the opportunity to volunteer to work with Quest in developing these models and tests. Player health and safety has been of paramount importance for our league and for this franchise for many years. We see our relationship with Quest as the next step in this process of improving the health of our players, not only during their careers but after their careers are over. We're very excited and proud to be partnering with a quality organization like Quest. I have been very impressed by how accomplished and persuasive their executives are. They convinced us of their ability to help our players achieve better health. Even more compelling, they convinced me to put a green colored logo on our building. We thank Quest for sharing our vision and our values and we're thrilled to become your partner today and for many years to come.
GIANTS HEAD COACH TOM COUGHLIN
Coughlin: Thank you, Bruce. You read what I wrote very well. On the eve of the opening of training camp 2013, it's an exciting time to us and a great time to announce the newest member of our team, Quest Diagnostics. I want to thank Quest for their commitment to our players' health and the goal of developing sports diagnostics to help all athletes. As an organization, we are committed to the mission of maximizing game day performance and reducing injuries and improving overall health. We will be a great partner in collaborating with Quest to achieve our shared objectives and those objectives are… and any time you want to talk about maximizing performance and reducing injuries, I'm in great support of that. I personally welcome Quest to our team and look forward to working together with them for the greater good of the sport of football. Thank you very much.
GIANTS SVP OF MEDICAL SERVICES RONNIE BARNESBarnes: Well we've been working on this for a year, and I've been anxious to start this press conference, but we had to delay it because of the U.K. Royal naming. But we're finally here, and we're happy to be here with our partners. It's my pleasure to welcome our new partner, Quest Diagnostics. I welcome Quest as the newest member of the New York Giants healthcare system. And I call it a healthcare system because our owner John Mara has said many times, "Ronnie, you've got more physicians than some small nations." This all started with a call from Quest Diagnostics after they had read an article about the Giants being involved in implementing new and emerging technologies. All this as it relates to sports performance, and the health and safety of our players. The Giants organization has always been focused with providing our players with the very best healthcare possible. We have also done a tremendous amount of research, and implemented new ideas in training, rehabilitation and injury prevention and we keep working on that. My role as a head athletic trainer for three decades has been to seek out the best possible healthcare specialists in the world for the benefit of our players. And in my short 38 years with the Giants, I've never been more proud of our commitment to assembling the best healthcare possible and the healthcare professionals that are going to be involved with Quest Diagnostics. I'm proud of our team of medical professionals, as well as our beautiful facilities, which you see here and, of course, our resources. There's no doubt in my mind Quest Diagnostics will make us better, and I'm proud of our new partners. We are committed to Quest's mission of developing sports diagnostics for the benefit of all athletes and all sports. And I also welcome them to our team of other healthcare professionals. Hackensack University Medical Center is a partner, New York Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell Medical Center, and of course our friends at the Hospital for Special Surgery. And all of them will be involved with us in this initiative. I believe this is a real dream team for our athletes. Personally, as a former Michigan State Spartan, I love the color green. Seriously, I'm proud to call our home the Quest Diagnostics Training Center. Quest truly cares about us and about our athletes, and it's more than just a name on the top of the building. It stands for the way we operate every day here. And as I say to our players every day, "It's a great day to be a Giant." I join Mr. Mara, Mr. Tisch, Coach Coughlin, Mr. Reese in welcoming Quest to our team, and thank you for your commitment. Dr. Cohen, we can't wait to get started.
QUEST DIAGNOSTICS PRESIDENT AND CEO STEVE RUSCKOWSKI
Rusckowski: Thank you, Bruce, and good morning everyone. I was walking slowly up here because I was going to give Ronnie a call last night. We had a charity softball game last night and of course I have my designated hitter role of hitting once and sprinting to first base, I pulled a hamstring…so I'm going to put our partnership to work fast. So thank you and thanks for everyone joining us here today. It's a proud moment to be associated with the New York Giants, and as we've been introduced we're very proud at Quest Diagnostics to be part of that. I actually have a special connection with you in this audience; my father-in-law, who just recently died, was a former Associated Press sports writer. His name was Dave O'Hara. So I can relate to all of you in the front of the room, so you might know Dave. He's in Heaven… with all the rest of the sports writers. So, I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you. Quest Diagnostics is a substantial company, we're the leader in our field; we actually employ about 42,000 people throughout the world; we're about 7.4 billion in sales; we're the largest; we're a Fortune 500 company; we're the New York Stock Exchange. Impressively, we touch about a third of Americans each year; we serve about half the physicians, half the hospitals in the United States. And our vision is we're not just a laboratory but we really empower better health with diagnostic insights. In a real testimony to what we're doing here today, we share a passion with the New York Giants. Yes, we're going to work with them with the athletes, the finest of athletes, but as importantly is to make this a healthier world. In working through this, Ronnie is going to be working closely with our own doctor, Dr. Jon Cohen. Dr. Cohen will be working closely with Ronnie Barnes. And together, we will build a new business: the sports diagnostics business. And we believe this is an opportunity to combine all the information we have, and diagnostic information services, with the talent and capabilities here with the New York Giants to really bring better health to the players of the Giants, to the players overall in professional sports, but all of us that in some point and time that could utilize this information. We also believe that this is important to our area, we've been in this area for some time. We're headquartered in New Jersey, in Madison, New Jersey; we actually have our roots in the New York/New Jersey area. A physician back in the late 60s started the field that we're in; he moved his headquarters to New Jersey, we've been here ever since. We employ about 3,000 people in the area so we're a significant employer. And we're drawn to the Giants not because they're just an excellent team in the NFL but they've really distinguished themselves as a leader, and we like to be associated with leaders. We also believe that the New York Giants are beyond football, they're really recognized in all professional sports, and we believe that putting the players first is important for all of us. We also like the association. As Ronnie said with other leaders in the New York/New Jersey area, he mentioned the name of the prestigious institutions that the New York Giants are part of and we're proud to be part of that family.
So we also believe that health and well-being is an important part of our other roles. We participate in that in our business and we're very proud to be associated with the New York Giants' in this effort. We believe the expo that we've put together this year, and will continue to do as we go forward, is a great example of two leaders in this area who will continue to promote better health. So this is just a beginning, we look forward to working with the New York Giants. Thank you very much.
QUEST DIAGNOSTICS SVP AND CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER DR. JOHN COHEN, MD
Cohen: Thanks Bruce and thank you to the Giants on this partnership. Just apropos to what Ronnie mentioned, you may not know that I actually spoke to Prince William and I recommended that they name him King Ronnie, but they didn't go for it. The other person I want to make sure I acknowledge is Everett Cunningham, who is sitting to the left. He is my partner in crime in the development of the sports diagnostics. He's the Senior Vice President for the commercial organization for Quest Diagnostics. He also happens to be a prior (minor) league baseball player. Sports Diagnostics… The partnership is to create diagnostic insights that improve player health, optimize player training, improve peak performance, decrease player susceptibly to injury and ultimately to improve game day performance. Combining biometric information such as respiratory rate, pulse, blood pressure with device-generated information such as speed, acceleration, force of impact and bio-markers such as glucose or a lactate; we strive to use all of this information to develop insights to improve the wellness of players and actually personalize individual performance. In addition to professional athletes, there are millions of amateur athletes who can benefit from these types of diagnostic insights. There are 45 million workout enthusiasts who belong to gyms, 30 million runners, 70,000 cyclists, 40,000 college athletes and approximately 7 million high school athletes. This generation of athletes is frequently tracking their diets, looking at their daily calorie intake, their daily exercise and their personal biometrics via mobile devices and are constantly looking for new ways to track and monitor their performance. Quest's mobile platform, Gazelle, with almost one half a million users, tracks this information through its personal health records, personal bio-marker management, and sophisticated mobile tracking of health data and outcomes is the future of improving performance. Imagine for a second that we knew how a particular individual performed relative to their inherent glucose response to exercise and maybe we can determine when it would be best to feed him a high calorie energy bar. Or maybe certain athletes accumulate muscle lactate at an increased level and then more frequent timeouts for that player may result in better field performance. The difference is that many folks out there are measuring what's going on outside of the body. We will be measuring what's going on inside the body. The point is that we are at a time where we can measure and develop personalized plans for each athlete. We know that player health and wellness is a top priority for the New York Giants franchise, which is why we believe they are a great partner for us to look and develop and enhance these kinds of offerings to professional and amateur athletes. Finally, the Giants have made it clear through their programs and actions their concern for the health and wellness of the greater community they serve, which includes their ex-players. Quest Diagnostics' program, which is called Blueprint For Wellness, is an innovative battery of tests that is designed to improve an individual's true understanding of their health by providing clear and simple explanations of their unique laboratory values and recommendations about how to improve their health. Almost 1.5 million across the country currently use this program. As part of this partnership, we plan to expand and develop that program and make it more accessible to the greater Giant community of prior players, supporters and fans. Thanks.
