Oomph! On Demand is a digital wellbeing platform designed for care homes across the UK. It provides activity content, personalised wellbeing programmes, and engagement tools for residents, care staff, and families — reaching over 5,000 care homes at its peak.

This is the story of how we built it, how the company that commissioned it was acquired mid-project, and how we ultimately handed over a production platform to an entirely different in-house team — winning a Health Tech Digital Award along the way.

The Challenge

Oomph! Wellness started as a company that delivered in-person wellbeing activities to care homes. Trained instructors would visit residential settings and lead exercise classes, music sessions, and social activities for elderly residents. It was a brilliant service — but it had an obvious scaling problem. You can only be in one care home at a time.

When COVID-19 hit, that scaling problem became an existential crisis. Care homes locked down. Visitors were banned. The in-person model was impossible overnight. Residents — many of them isolated, confused, and frightened — lost access to the social interaction and physical activity that had been keeping them well.

Oomph! came to us with an urgent brief: take everything they knew about wellbeing in care settings and put it on a screen. Not a video library. Not a YouTube channel. A proper digital platform that care staff could use with residents, that maintained the personalised, structured approach of the in-person service, and that could be deployed to thousands of care homes immediately.

The timeline was weeks, not months. People were deteriorating. The need was real and immediate.

Then Everything Changed

Partway through the build, Oomph! Wellness was acquired by PCS (Person Centred Software), one of the UK’s largest care technology providers. Overnight, the scope changed. The platform we were building didn’t just need to work for Oomph!’s existing clients — it needed to integrate with PCS’s wider ecosystem of care home management tools, serving a much larger network of care homes across the UK.

New stakeholders. New technical requirements. New integration points. And the same urgent timeline, because residents in locked-down care homes couldn’t wait for a corporate restructuring to finish.

We adapted. The architecture we’d designed was flexible enough to accommodate the expanded scope. The integration work was significant, but the core platform — the part that actually mattered to residents and care staff — continued to develop on schedule.

What We Built

Personalised resident profiles. Every resident had a digital profile capturing their preferences, abilities, interests, and care needs. Activities were recommended based on these profiles, ensuring that a chair-based exercise class was suggested to someone with limited mobility, while a more active resident might see a dance session or gardening activity.

Structured content library. Hundreds of professionally produced wellbeing activities, organised by category (physical, cognitive, social, creative), difficulty level, group size, and duration. Care staff could find and deliver appropriate activities in under a minute, with no training required.

CQC compliance tools. The Care Quality Commission requires care homes to demonstrate that they’re providing meaningful activity and social engagement for residents. Oomph! On Demand automatically generated evidence of activity delivery, participation records, and wellbeing outcomes that care homes could present at inspection. This alone saved hours of manual record-keeping per week.

Family access portal. During lockdown, families couldn’t visit. We built a portal that allowed family members to see what activities their loved one had been participating in, view photos (with appropriate consent workflows), and feel connected to the care home’s daily life. For families who hadn’t been able to visit for months, this was transformative.

PCS integration. Following the acquisition, we integrated Oomph! On Demand with PCS’s existing care management platform, allowing data to flow between the wellbeing system and the wider care record. Activity participation, mood observations, and engagement metrics became part of the resident’s holistic digital care record.

Analytics and reporting. Care home managers and regional directors could see engagement patterns across their entire portfolio. Which homes were most active? Which residents were at risk of isolation? Where should resources be focused? Data-driven decisions replaced gut feel.

The Handover

From the outset, we knew this platform would eventually be maintained by PCS’s in-house development team. That knowledge shaped how we built it. Every architectural decision, every piece of documentation, every code pattern was designed for handover.

We ran a structured handover process over several weeks: pair programming sessions with the PCS engineering team, comprehensive technical documentation, architecture decision records explaining not just what we built but why, and a period of parallel running where both teams worked on the codebase simultaneously.

The handover was successful. PCS’s team took full ownership of the platform and continued to develop it. This is one of the outcomes we’re most proud of — building something robust and well-documented enough that another team could pick it up and run with it without us.

The Impact

Oomph! On Demand reached over 5,000 care homes across the UK. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was one of the only structured wellbeing services available to locked-down care home residents. Care staff who had no experience delivering activity programmes could provide high-quality, personalised sessions using the platform with minimal training.

The platform won a Health Tech Digital Award for Best COVID-19 Solution for Mental Health — recognition of the real, measurable impact it had on resident wellbeing during the most challenging period the UK care sector has ever faced.

Families reported feeling more connected to their loved ones. Care staff reported feeling more confident delivering activities. CQC inspectors noted improved evidence of meaningful engagement. And residents — the people who mattered most — had access to structured activity and social interaction at a time when everything else had been taken away.

Tech Stack

  • PWA — Progressive Web App optimised for tablets (the primary device in care home settings), with offline capability for homes with unreliable connectivity
  • Vue.js — Frontend framework providing a responsive, intuitive interface designed for care staff with varying levels of technical confidence
  • Node.js / Serverless — Backend architecture using serverless functions for scalability across 5,000+ care homes without infrastructure management overhead
  • Firebase — Real-time database and authentication, enabling instant content updates and secure user management at scale
  • Integration APIs — Bi-directional integration with PCS’s care management platform for seamless data exchange between wellbeing and care record systems
  • Cloud-hosted — Scalable cloud infrastructure with data residency in the UK, meeting NHS and social care data governance requirements

Key Takeaway

This project tested everything: urgent timelines, a mid-project acquisition, integration with a platform we didn’t build, and a handover to a team we’d never met when we started. Every one of those challenges could have derailed the project. None of them did.

The reason is straightforward. We build software the same way whether the timeline is comfortable or compressed, whether the client is a startup or a company mid-acquisition, whether we’re maintaining it long-term or handing it over next month. Clean architecture. Clear documentation. Production-grade code from day one. No shortcuts that create debt for whoever comes next.

When you build like that, you can absorb surprises. The scope can change, the stakeholders can change, the ownership can change — and the software keeps working, because it was built properly in the first place.