At Culturewell, we believe that ongoing cleaning compliance and outbreak detection programs are essential to driving risk-based quality improvement in healthcare facilities and beyond.
- Why do we only worry about infections once patients get infected? Wouldn’t we want to prevent already vulnerable patients from getting infected in the first place?”
Our Origins
With an undergraduate education and certification in Medical Laboratory Science plus a masters degree in Health Services Administration, years of experience working and leading clinical and environmental microbiology laboratories in multiple healthcare systems, Culturewell founder and CEO, Sarah Beatty, kept encountering the same problems from different angles:
- Nurses who would ask “I think there is mold in a patient room. What is it and what do we do about it?”
- Hospital-based clinical microbiology labs routinely refuse to do environmental testing because they lack the expertise, methods, and technology to handle environmental samples.
- Research projects to investigate how to prevent infection spread within hospitals for both Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) that highlighted how ancient the available “state-of-the-art” technologies and testing procedures in the industry were.
- Environmental microbiology labs routinely decline healthcare projects because they do not know how to meet the stringent requirements of healthcare facilities and so decline to offer services to such clients.
Realizing that no one else had effectively dealt with these problems and seeing the shape of a solution that would address all the critical hurdles, in 2021, she launched Culturewell, Co.
A company designed from the ground up to provide the consistent sampling, purpose-built processes, and actionable insights that would enable healthcare leaders to stop healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) before they start, if only they had the time, technology, and resources.
Our Mission
With her passion to support proactive infection prevention across the full spectrum of healthcare facilities, our founder, Sarah Beatty, committed to a mission to advocate for a more equitable future for all:
Culturewell, Co. is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation with a mission to address social determinants of health for the communities in which we operate by:
- Advocating for social, racial, and economic justice in healthcare delivery.
- Nurturing a balanced, equitable, and diverse workforce for our team members.
- Promoting stewardship of the Earth through sustainable business practices.
Board of Directors
Sarah Beatty
- 10+ years managing high-volume microbiology labs
- Background in clinical laboratory science and healthcare administration
Jen Baird
- 20+ years as a successful serial venture-backed entrepreneur, leading several healthcare startups
- Serves on public, private, and nonprofit boards
Mike Flanagan
- 15+ years in the startup ecosystem
- Made 50+ investments and manages investments in a portfolio of 200+ startup companies
