Within a year, Douglas Ford literally went from an ICU bed to earning Forbes magazine’s 30-under-30 recognition for launching Chromie Health, an AI startup that addresses the critical nursing shortage crisis with innovative scheduling solutions.
“This is not just Forbes’ 30-under-30 recognition win for myself, my co-founder and the team behind Chromie, but also really a win for Washington Township,” said Ford, the first person in the township to get the recognition. “I’m so proud of the community and of New Jersey, South Jersey.
“Without the community, I never would have gotten the care I deserved and also just this recognition, because it’s not just a win for us, but really for the entire community, which I’m so proud to share with everybody.”
Ford is a 2014 graduate of the township high school who was visiting family during the holidays in December 2023.
“At the time, I was at Harvard studying finals and I was very stressed,” he recalled. “The night before I was admitted to the hospital, I had chest pains, which I thought was a common cold. The next morning, I knew something was wrong. It was like my body was screaming, ‘Red alert. Get to the emergency room now.'”
Ford went to the emergency room at Jefferson Washington Township.
“It looked like a war zone,” he remembered, with patients not only in the waiting room but outside.
After nine hours of waiting, Ford’s condition – finally diagnosed as myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart – got worse. Code blue, or critical care, was called and he was emergency evacuated to the University of Pennsylvania and placed in the ICU for two weeks.
The issue, he later would find out while in an ICU bed, was a nursing labor-shortage crisis. That’s when the wheels started churning for his idea to create Chromie Health with his co-founder, Scott Tisoskey.
“I spent those two weeks thinking of a solution,” Ford explained, literally jotting ideas on an intake form. “Some of the customer demos we have since done in rural areas in Arkansas, they still use pen and paper for payroll and for clocking in and out.
“So we really decided to leverage AI and technology to remove the guess and demand from nurse managers when scheduling nurses and to really provide a product that can help solve this issue.”
So that is the ultimate goal of Chromie Health, based in New York City, to end the nursing crisis.
“We’re actively growing to levels that we could have never even imagined,” said the 28-year-old. “In the future, we see ourselves continuing to grow as a health-care leader for innovation, driving capital solutions, address systemic challenges like the nursing labor-shortage crisis and aspiring to integrate advanced technology, not only AI, which is where our product is, but also quantum computing.
“… Ultimately, at the end of the day, we want to become the Uber of health-care scheduling and to be the leader for (it) and really just end this nursing labor shortage. I tell my team every day, ‘move fast and save lives.'”
The Forbes’ 30-under-30 recognition is icing on the top of Ford’s work at Chromie Health, where he is also CEO. Since its launch, the startup has more than $2.1 million in funding, achieved a 28% growth rate and has been deployed in 120 nursing teams around the world.
“To be recognized following the likes of Malala Yousafzai (a Pakistani activist), Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook, now Meta) and (singer) Rihanna,” Ford said, “is surreal.”
Douglas Ford is the first person in the township to win Forbes magazine’s 30-under-30 recognition.
