A Chat with Ruth Kyle, COO at AI-Care System: Health Connect Global

Health Connect Global has developed an AI-native operating system for care, within which sits OpenDoc. Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Ruth Kyle discusses her role, OpenDoc, women in tech, and why the future of care technology requires more frontline input.

What’s your role and mission?

As COO and co-founder, I oversee operations, ensuring our vision translates into practical delivery. Our technology aims to provide everything a care provider needs to run safe, high-quality services and connects everything into one intelligent system. The end result is that care providers do not have to waste time on multiple disconnected systems to get answers.

AI is at the core of our products and integrated into both clinical and operational workflows, which allows for real-time analytics and decision support to improve patient care. And our mission is simple: we wish to improve health and wellbeing for everyone, everywhere.

What problems are you trying to solve?

We want to free staff from administrative tasks to allow them to provide more direct care and use modern technology to enhance that provision of care. Care staff do their best, but they are overwhelmed by paperwork and siloed data that’s time-consuming to keep on top of. When something goes wrong in care, it is often the care workers who take the blame, even when the real issue was that no one could see the full picture in time. One of the key questions we asked ourselves was “How do we ensure the infrastructure carries more of the burden, so humans can focus on care?”

Can you explain OpenDoc in simple terms?

OpenDoc is a document management system and open library for health and social care policies. It’s supported by UK care experts who contribute to a shared framework. Contributors include professionals who are called in to services when problems have already occurred and expertise is needed to address problems. Many experts from consulting, clinical, and operational backgrounds have engaged with us to pool sector knowledge, combining human expertise with AI for usability.

Why is OpenDoc described as a “collective brain” for care?

For the first time in UK care history, experts from across the sector have united to develop a shared governance framework. Contributors include ex-CQC inspectors, governance specialists, clinical leaders, safeguarding authorities, turnaround consultants, and leaders of some of the country’s best care providers. The sector’s knowledge is pooled in one place, made usable by both human intelligence and AI.

Today it holds over 900 policies donated by experts and organisations across the sector. It serves as a sector-wide collaboration aimed at resolving long-standing issues in governance and compliance. That’s why people describe it as “a collective brain.”

What is the OpenDoc summit at Westminster?

The summit at the Garden Museum on 28 January 2026 is about bringing people together to collaborate and improve care at scale. It will be attended by bodies like the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), and more than 150 care providers. We will be demonstrating how OpenDoc can support improvement in care, regulatory inspections, and commissioning, and building on the collaboration that has already begun so we can make the “Collective Brain” more representative of the whole sector and an even bigger brain.

What challenges do you anticipate with OpenDoc or AI integration in care? 

Health tech faces significant hurdles, including data privacy concerns under GDPR, interoperability with legacy NHS systems, and ensuring AI doesn’t introduce biases or errors. Adoption can be slow due to resistance from the sector to change. We are addressing this by prioritising user-friendly interfaces and collaborating with experts, but it’s an ongoing process.

What’s your biggest fear about OpenDoc’s adoption?

My biggest fear isn’t that people won’t adopt OpenDoc, it’s that they’ll adopt it for the wrong reasons. If OpenDoc just becomes the place you download policies so you can tick a box for an inspection, then we’ve failed. The whole point is to change how governance works in real life, not to make it easier to copy-paste a policy you never look at again.

I also worry about it becoming dominated by a small number of loud voices. If only the biggest providers or the usual experts shape it, then it stops being a collective brain and just becomes another centralised viewpoint with a nicer interface. The power of OpenDoc is that a nurse in a single home and a national provider both get to influence what “good” looks like.

What are your top three takeaways for women who want to get into tech?

First, don’t wait to feel “fully qualified.” AI is a new field and evolving fast. Women already make up the majority of management and nursing roles in care. By virtue of that frontline expertise, they are already “qualified” to contribute to the development of technology and AI. Second, treat non-tech experience as a superpower.

If you understand care, operations, people, or regulation, you already have context, and that is what many tech teams are missing. Context is crucial for developing workflows and training AI. And finally, remember the win isn’t getting one woman into the room. It’s getting to a point where it’s no longer remarkable that we are there at all. So when you’re in, use your voice to bring others through with you and let your abilities be what holds the door open for more women to come through.