Biosecurity specialist Perimeter and outbreak detection company Culturewell have launched a joint infection surveillance programme to assist hospitals in identifying and mitigating risks before they develop into healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).
The Massachusetts- and Michigan-based companies’ joint offering has been designed to provide healthcare institutions (HCIs) with a continuous, multi-level view of infection risk.
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Combining Culturewell’s room-level surface sampling with Perimeter’s building-level wastewater sequencing and global biothreat intelligence, the partnership is positioned to provide HCIs with more information about pathogen circulation and location in the hospital environment, along with comparisons to 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”, the companies stated.
Under the partnership, Culturewell will provide surface sampling and analysis, with samples analysed in its laboratory, delivering results in around 18 hours.
Meanwhile, Perimeter will monitor biological data flowing beneath the surface through its biothreat radar infrastructure. Through continuous metagenomic sequencing and bioinformatic analysis, the company asserts that it is able to characterise biological threats by tracking the movement of pathogens and resistance genes at the ward and building levels by using signals derived from on-premises plumbing.
The company’s joint offering is now available to participating hospitals and health systems.
Culturewell’s CEO, Sarah Beatty, said: “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.
“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 programme to more hospitals and connect it to the larger effort to stay ahead of outbreaks and biological threats at the national level.”
HAIs represent a significant threat to hospitals and healthcare systems, with research from BMJ Journals indicating that HAIs cost England’s NHS around £2.7bn ($3.59bn) annually. Meanwhile, data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that on any given day, approximately one in 31 hospitalised patients in the US has at least one HAI. In 2015, the CDC estimated that there were 687,000 HAIs in US acute care hospitals, with around 72,000 hospital patients with HAIs dying during their hospitalisations.
