The Office on Women's Health initiative to improve women's heart health: program description, site characteristics, and lessons learned.

Aims: Improving, Enhancing and Evaluating Outcomes of Comprehensive Heart Health Care Programs for High Risk Women has funded six diverse centers to provide chronic disease risk factor screening and lifestyle interventions for women and focuses specifically on low-income, minority women.

Results: This article describes the rationale for these diverse programs across the country, all focusing on improving outcomes for women with or at risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The six programs include College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, Christ Community Health Services in Memphis, Women's Heart Center of Fox Valley Cardiovascular Consultants, University of Minnesota, University of California Davis Women's Cardiovascular Medicine Program, and Yale-New Haven Hospital's Women's Heart Advantage.

Conclusions: We present six differing approaches to women's heart programs. Based on this experience, promoting CVD prevention in women is a feasible healthcare delivery strategy for health promotion and for delivering preventive strategies for high-risk women. It is possible to deliver heart-healthy programs through existing healthcare infrastructures. These programs provide important models for public health, voluntary, and other health organizations to develop networks for population-based, targeted, relatively low cost programs that support Healthy People 2010 objectives for lifestyle changes and cardiovascular health. Ongoing longitudinal analysis of the programs will provide information about clinical outcomes and sustainability of such programs beyond the funding period.