BURLINGTON, Vt., Feb. 24, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PureWellness and the prestigious Brigham and Women's Hospital have once again delivered impressive results in their third annual 'Beat the Holiday Bulge' Weight Management Challenge.

The 'Beat the Holiday Bulge' Challenge utilizes the PureWellness online wellness platform to motivate and educate participants to exercise, eat well and improve individual wellbeing during the holiday season. While the average American gains 2 to 5 pounds during the holiday season, the 1,765 BHB participants lost a combined 662 pounds during the four-week program.
 
Brigham and Women's Cardiovascular Wellness Service sponsored and participated in the 'Beat the Holiday Bulge' program this year. "Prevention is key to improving the heart health of America," said Dr. JoAnne Foody, Medical Director of the Cardiovascular Wellness Service at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Through 'Beat the Holiday Bulge,' we provide members with a fun and effective way to reduce cardiovascular risk during a time when making heart healthy choices can be particularly difficult."
 
Although 'Beat the Holiday Bulge' wrapped up at the close of the holiday season, the Cardiovascular Wellness Service has since partnered with Sister to Sister to launch their new online wellness program, Smart for the Heart, on February 1st in honor of National Heart Month. This program, powered by PureWellness, is available for free nationwide at www.smartfortheheart.org. It is designed to help individuals maintain heart health year-round through a variety of online interventions, including workshops, online tools and a wealth of patient-friendly health information from Healthwise.
 
"We continue to be excited about our partnership with such a prestigious institution as Brigham and Women's Hospital. Together we are delivering programs that are impacting lives and delivering meaningful results to participants." said Ken Kaufman, president of PureWellness.
 
For more information, contact Andy Comeau at Andy.comeau@purewellness.com
 
About PureWellness, Inc.

PureWellness, founded in 1998, provides a comprehensive, scalable, online wellness program. The PureWellness platform allows for efficient administration and management of all wellness initiatives within each organization. This wellness platform provides numerous resources, including an online Health Risk Assessment (HRA), wellness workshops, team challenge capabilities, tracking tools, employee incentive programs and a full reporting suite to ensure that every wellness initiative will be able to document success in a structured manner that demonstrates return on investment.

The PureWellness logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=11773

About Brigham and Women's Hospital

Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is a 793-bed non-profit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of Partners HealthCare, an integrated health care delivery network. BWH is the home of the Carl J. and Ruth Shapiro Cardiovascular Center, the most advanced center of its kind. BWH is committed to excellence in patient care with expertise in virtually every specialty of medicine and surgery. Through investigation and discovery conducted at its Biomedical Research Institute, BWH is an international leader in basic, clinical and translational research on human diseases, involving more than 900 physician-investigators and renowned biomedical scientists and faculty. BWH is home to major landmark epidemiologic population studies, including the Nurses' and Physicians' Health Studies and the Women's Health Initiative. For more information, please visit www.brighamandwomens.org">www.brighamandwomens.org.

About Healthwise

Healthwise is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help people make better health decisions. People have turned to Healthwise information more than a billion times to learn how to do more for themselves, ask for the care they need, and say "no" to the care they don't need. Healthwise partners with hospitals, electronic medical record (EMR) providers, health plans, disease management companies, and health websites to provide up-to-date, evidence-based information to the people they serve. www.healthwise.org, 1.800.706.9646.

About Sister to Sister

Sister to Sister: The Women's Heart Health Foundation was started by women's health advocate Irene Pollin in 1999. A widely published expert on chronic illness, Mrs. Pollin realized that women were losing their lives to a disease they had the power to prevent. With only sheer determination to guide her, Mrs. Pollin organized the first Sister to Sister Women's Heart Health Fair in Washington, DC. Her idea caught on. Today, Sister to Sister fairs have been in more than 20 U.S. cities. We've screened over 80,000 women and remain the nation's largest provider of free heart disease screenings for women. Through it all, we've remained true to our life-saving mission:

• To increase awareness among women that heart disease is our number-one killer.
• To offer women free cardiac screenings for early detection and treatment.
• To educate women that healthy lifestyle changes can reduce heart disease risk dramatically.
  
  For more information about Sister to Sister, please visit www.sistertosister.org