This is the story of a project that changed shape mid-build, survived an acquisition, won a national award, and ultimately proved that the best measure of success isn't whether you keep the contract -- it's whether the product thrives after you hand it over.
The Challenge
Oomph Wellness was a company on a mission: improving the quality of life for elderly residents in care homes across the UK. They provided in-person wellbeing activities -- exercise classes, cognitive stimulation sessions, creative workshops -- delivered by trained facilitators who visited care homes regularly.
The model worked. Care homes loved it. Residents benefited measurably. But it had an obvious scaling problem: you can only train so many facilitators, and each one can only visit so many homes in a week. Oomph was reaching around 1,200 care homes, but the demand was far greater than what in-person delivery could serve.
Their vision was essentially "Netflix for care home activities" -- a digital platform that could deliver their wellbeing content on-demand, enabling any care home to access high-quality activities regardless of whether a facilitator could physically be there.
The concept was compelling. An elderly resident with limited mobility could follow a gentle chair-based exercise class on a screen. A care worker with no formal activity training could facilitate a cognitive stimulation session using guided content. A care home manager could demonstrate to inspectors that they were delivering meaningful, evidence-based wellbeing activities every day, not just when a facilitator happened to visit.
That was the brief. Build the platform that makes this possible at scale.
Then Everything Changed
We were approximately 90% through the initial build when Oomph Wellness was acquired by Person Centred Software (PCS), one of the UK's largest care technology providers. PCS serves over 8,000 care providers with their Connected Care ecosystem -- a suite of digital tools covering care planning, medication management, monitoring, and more.
An acquisition at 90% completion is, to put it diplomatically, a challenging moment in a software project.
The product we'd been building as a standalone platform now needed to integrate into a much larger ecosystem. The brand identity changed. The user base expanded dramatically. The technical requirements shifted from "independent SaaS product" to "module within a connected care suite." And there was a new stakeholder group -- PCS's technical leadership -- who had their own standards, their own architecture, and their own opinions about how things should work.
Some agencies would have treated this as a disaster. We treated it as what it was: a significant scope change that required adaptability, clear communication, and a willingness to rethink assumptions.
We sat down with both the Oomph team and the PCS technical leadership, mapped out the integration requirements, and rebuilt our roadmap. Some features were accelerated because PCS wanted them for their broader ecosystem. Others were deprioritized because PCS already had equivalent functionality in their existing tools. The architecture needed modification to work within PCS's infrastructure and comply with their data governance requirements.
It was messy. It was complicated. And it resulted in a better product than we would have built in isolation.
What We Built
The finished platform was substantially more capable than the original brief, thanks to the expanded scope that came with the PCS acquisition:
Personalized Resident Profiles
Each resident in the system had a detailed profile capturing their preferences, capabilities, medical conditions, and activity history. This wasn't a generic user account -- it was a care-informed profile that enabled the platform to recommend appropriate activities based on a resident's specific needs.
A resident with dementia would see different content than a physically mobile resident looking for exercise classes. A resident who loved music would get music-based activities surfaced prominently. The personalization was granular enough to be genuinely useful without being so complex that care staff couldn't manage it.
Content Library
Hundreds of professionally produced wellbeing activities covering physical exercise, cognitive stimulation, creative arts, reminiscence therapy, and social engagement. Each piece of content was tagged with difficulty levels, duration, required equipment (if any), and the specific wellbeing outcomes it addressed.
The content was produced by Oomph's team of wellbeing experts and filmed to a standard that made it engaging on a screen -- not just a camera pointed at an instructor, but thoughtfully produced content with clear instructions, appropriate pacing for an elderly audience, and visual cues for participants with hearing difficulties.
Live and On-Demand Sessions
The platform supported both pre-recorded content (the "Netflix" model) and live-streamed sessions where a facilitator could interact with multiple care homes simultaneously. The live sessions preserved the human connection that made Oomph's in-person service special, while reaching ten times as many homes per session.
Care homes could schedule sessions in advance, join live streams as they happened, or browse the on-demand library at any time. The flexibility was essential -- care homes operate on unpredictable schedules, and a platform that required everyone to be available at 2 PM on Tuesday wouldn't work in practice.
CQC Outcome Tracking
This was one of the features that became critical after the PCS acquisition. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the UK's care regulator, and care homes are regularly inspected against a framework that includes resident wellbeing. The platform tracked activity participation, engagement levels, and wellbeing outcomes in a format that mapped directly to CQC inspection criteria.
Care home managers could generate reports showing exactly which activities each resident had participated in, how often, and what outcomes were achieved. This transformed wellbeing activities from a "nice to have" into a documented, evidence-based part of the care plan -- something inspectors could see and evaluate.
Staff Tools
Care workers needed tools that were simple enough to use with minimal training. We built a facilitator mode that guided staff through activity sessions step by step, with prompts for timing, equipment setup, and participant engagement. A care worker with no prior experience in leading wellbeing activities could facilitate a high-quality session by following the platform's guidance.
Training modules were built into the platform itself -- not as separate documents or courses, but as contextual guidance that appeared when and where staff needed it.
Family Access
A dedicated interface for residents' family members, allowing them to see what activities their loved one was participating in and how they were responding. In an industry where families often feel disconnected from their relative's daily life in care, this feature provided transparency and reassurance.
PCS Integration
The most technically complex piece: deep integration with PCS's Connected Care ecosystem. Activity data flowed into care plans. Resident profiles synced between systems. Staff authentication was unified across the PCS suite. The wellbeing platform became a native part of the Connected Care experience rather than a bolt-on product.
The Handover
After 2.5 years of development -- from the initial Oomph build through the acquisition and PCS integration -- we handed the platform over to PCS's internal development team.
This is the part of the story that some agencies would gloss over or spin as a negative. We see it as one of the biggest successes of the entire project.
A successful handover means the product is mature enough, well-documented enough, and architecturally sound enough for another team to take it forward confidently. It means we built something sustainable, not something that depends on us to survive.
The handover process was thorough:
- Comprehensive documentation -- Architecture decision records, API documentation, deployment runbooks, and operational guides covering every aspect of the system.
- Knowledge transfer sessions -- Structured workshops with PCS's engineering team covering the codebase, the design decisions behind it, and the operational nuances that documentation alone can't capture.
- Paired development -- A transition period where our developers worked alongside PCS's team, gradually handing over ownership of different system components.
- Support period -- Post-handover availability for questions and issues as the PCS team built confidence with the codebase.
PCS took the platform forward, integrating it more deeply into their ecosystem and expanding its reach to their full network of 8,000+ care providers. The product didn't just survive the handover -- it grew.
The Impact
The platform became part of PCS's Connected Care offering, reaching over 8,000 care providers across the UK -- far beyond the 1,200 homes that Oomph had originally served.
The most tangible external recognition came when the platform won the Health Tech Digital Award for Best COVID-19 Solution for Mental Health. During the pandemic, when care homes were locked down and in-person activities were impossible, the platform became a lifeline. Residents who were isolated from family, friends, and their normal routines could still access daily wellbeing activities. Care staff who were under extraordinary pressure had a tool that helped them support residents' mental health without requiring additional time or training.
The timing was coincidental -- we hadn't built the platform with a pandemic in mind. But the architecture decisions we'd made -- on-demand content, low-bandwidth optimization, simple staff interfaces -- turned out to be exactly what the situation demanded.
Tech Stack
- Progressive Web App (PWA) -- Care homes use a wide range of devices: tablets, smart TVs, desktop computers, and personal smartphones. A PWA gave us the broadest possible compatibility without requiring app store distribution, which would have been a significant barrier for many care homes.
- Vue.js -- Frontend framework. The reactive data binding was particularly valuable for the live session features, where content needed to update in real-time as facilitators progressed through activities.
- Node.js / Serverless -- Backend services. Serverless architecture for the content delivery and API layer, with dedicated Node.js services for the real-time features (live sessions, notifications).
- Firebase -- Real-time database and authentication. Used for the live session features where low-latency data synchronization between facilitators and participants was essential.
- Integration APIs -- RESTful APIs for PCS ecosystem integration, handling bidirectional data flow between the wellbeing platform and PCS's care planning, resident management, and reporting systems.
- Cloud-hosted, multi-region -- Deployed across multiple regions for reliability and performance. Care homes are geographically dispersed, and the live streaming features required consistent low latency regardless of location.
Key Takeaway
The Oomph project taught us two things that we carry into every engagement.
First: build for change. The acquisition happened at 90% completion and fundamentally altered the product's scope, audience, and technical requirements. If we'd built a rigid, tightly-coupled system, that pivot would have been a rewrite. Instead, our architectural choices -- modular design, clean API boundaries, separation of concerns -- meant we could adapt without starting over. We build every project with the assumption that something unexpected will happen, because in our experience, it always does.
Second: a successful handover is a success, not a loss. Some agencies design their code to be opaque, creating dependency that keeps clients locked in. We take the opposite approach. If another team can pick up our codebase and run with it confidently, that's proof we built it right. The goal is a product that outlasts the engagement -- and Oomph is exactly that. It's still serving care homes years after we handed it over, integrated into an ecosystem far larger than the one we originally built for.
Building through an acquisition, adapting to radically changed requirements, and then handing over a product that thrives without you -- that's the full lifecycle of a real software project. And it's the kind of challenge we've built our practice around.