Abigail Klein Leichman
July 23, 2012

New father Amit Elisha, VP of Products at Outbrain, recently blogged about how the Israel-founded company – which provides the content discovery platform underneath the covers of leading news websites – donated a few lines of code that could ultimately save little lives.

Aviv Elisha was born prematurely in February and spent 98 days in an Israeli hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). His parents quickly learned that the worst nemesis of fragile preemies is infection. NICU doctors and nurses spend much of their time on painstaking procedures to avoid passing germs to the newborns.

Amit writes that just before his son came home, a sign appeared on the NICU door asking for any computer-savvy parents to make themselves known to the charge nurse.

“I volunteered and spoke to the Director of Neonatology about the sign. He explained that ‘days with no infection’ is one of the most important key performance indicators for the NICU. He asked if I would be able to write a script that could count the number of days since the last infection and be reset with a click of a button. … What they really needed was software that could track the three different forms of infections while also highlighting the total number of days since the last incident.”

An Outbrain programmer named Uriel wrote the code, and the application was installed at the hospital and even mentioned at a conference about infection prevention.

Amit reports that each Outbrain employee gets $300 a month to promote content of his/her choice.

“Giving back to the community is one of Outbrain’s core principles. Our first dollar in revenue was shared with a charity organization. One percent of our founded equity is being donated to Tmura, The Israeli Public Service Venture Fund. We have donated traffic to help non-profits during disasters, provided food for families in need, helped save a few whales and Bluefin tunas and we have ‘Meatless Tuesdays’ every week. We are blessed with the ability to amplify content and write beautiful code and I’m proud and thankful that we were able to use these abilities to help other premature babies end their journey in a place where they belong … home.”

Now that’s a dad you can be proud of, Aviv!

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