Combines Perimeter’s Biothreat Radar platform with Culturewell’s outbreak detection and cleaning compliance platform to help hospitals find and stop outbreaks before they impact patients.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. and BOSTON, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Perimeter and Culturewell® today announced a joint infection surveillance program that provides hospitals with a continuous, multi-level view of infection risk. By combining monitoring of hospital surfaces and building-level wastewater with broader local and global outbreak intelligence, the offering empowers hospitals to identify and mitigate risks before they develop into healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).

Many HAIs originate within the hospital environment itself; patients are up to six times more likely to acquire an infection carried by a room’s prior occupant, even when the room appears clean.¹ Traditionally, hospitals operate reactively, investigating only after outbreaks cause harm. Furthermore, current environmental monitoring forces already-stretched staff to shoulder the burden of collecting samples, managing logistics, and manually interpreting generic lab reports that can take weeks to arrive.

Culturewell and Perimeter’s joint offering shifts this dynamic, integrating three complementary data streams to provide a comprehensive, multi-layered view of infection risk. By combining Culturewell’s room-level surface sampling with Perimeter’s building-level wastewater sequencing and global biothreat intelligence, the partnership tells hospitals exactly what pathogens are circulating, where they are located, and how those findings compare to broader regional trends. This unification of granular, local, anonymous hospital data with wide-scale environmental intelligence delivers earlier warnings and a more robust evidence base for protecting patients than any single monitoring layer could achieve alone.

Through this partnership, Culturewell will provide turn-key surface sampling and analysis, with its trained experts collecting samples on site that are then analyzed and measured in Culturewell’s vertically-integrated laboratory with industry-leading sensitivity before delivering results in as little as 18 hours. This allows the company’s recommendation engine and certified infection preventionists to deliver clear, room-by-room and unit-by-unit findings and identify possible trends while ensuring all environmental services, infection prevention, nursing, and facilities teams are working from the same information and are able to move quickly to fix potential issues that could lead to an infection.

Perimeter’s role is to monitor biological data flowing beneath the surface through its Biothreat Radar infrastructure. Through continuous metagenomic sequencing and bioinformatic analysis, Perimeter characterizes biological threats by tracking the movement of pathogens and resistance genes at the ward and building levels using signals derived from premise plumbing. This anonymized local data is then combined with global biothreat intelligence, a continuously updated feed built from thousands of global outbreak signals, to help hospitals forecast and understand their risk in context, enabling them to act on signals before they manifest as clinical cases.

“Too many infections start with the hospital facility itself, the built environment. Infection preventionists usually need to wait for an outbreak to occur before they can secure the necessary support from leadership,” said Sarah Beatty, Founder and CEO of Culturewell. “We built Culturewell so the people who protect patients in environmental services, infection prevention, nursing, and beyond can understand where germs are hiding and solve the problem before anyone gets sick. Working together with Perimeter lets us bring this program to more hospitals and connect it to the larger effort to stay ahead of outbreaks and biological threats at the national level.”

“Culturewell and Perimeter are both looking for pathogens in the hospital environment: Culturewell on surfaces, Perimeter in the wastewater,” said Matt McKnight, CEO of Perimeter. “What makes this partnership unique is putting those two views together and placing them in context, comparing what we’re finding in any one individual hospital to what’s circulating regionally and globally. That context is what turns a local finding into an early warning, and it’s what helps our clients move from detection to decisive action.”

The joint offering is available now to participating hospitals and health systems. To learn more, visit getculturewell.com or perimeter.bio, or contact the media representatives below.

Culturewell® is a registered trademark of Culturewell, Co.

About Culturewell

Culturewell® is an outbreak detection and cleaning compliance platform for hospitals. Culturewell handles environmental monitoring from start to finish: trained, proficiency-tested professionals collect standardized samples on site; its vertically-integrated national laboratory finds and measures the living germs on hospital surfaces with industry-leading sensitivity; and its dashboard, recommendation engine, and certified infection preventionists give hospital teams clear, room-by-room answers and evidence-based next steps. Culturewell equips environmental services, infection prevention, nursing, and facilities teams to detect outbreaks, verify cleaning workflows, and stop the infections that spread through the hospital environment, and in doing so is building the first structured, longitudinal record of the germs found in healthcare environments. Learn more at getculturewell.com.

About Perimeter

Perimeter is the biosecurity infrastructure to enable a better prepared world. Its Biothreat Radar infrastructure detects biological threats as they emerge, characterizes risk, and guides decisive response. Powered by a distributed sampling network, metagenomic sequencing, computational biology, and AI, Perimeter delivers biointelligence across environments, from airports and hospitals to wastewater systems and critical infrastructure, helping decision-makers act before crises escalate. Learn more at perimeter.bio.

References

1. Cohen B, Liu J, Cohen AR, Larson E. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2018;39(5):541-546. doi:10.1017/ice.2018.22. PMID: 29486805.

Media Contacts

Culturewell inquiries: hello@getculturewell.com; 734/221-0853

Perimeter:
Kate Thompson / Erik Carlson / Alexander Wolfsohn
Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher
212.355.4449
Perimeter-JF@joelefrank.com  

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/perimeter-and-culturewell-launch-joint-offering-to-prevent-healthcare-associated-infections-302854136.html

SOURCE Perimeter Systems, Inc.