Сorporate wellness platform
Our client, a US-based B2B wellness tech company, offers a SaaS platform for enterprise-level companies to run employee wellness challenges and health incentive campaigns. The company’s original platform, a PHP monolith from 2015, strained under the data load from new clients.
Touchlane augmented the team with three senior full-stack developers to redesign, build, and deploy a modern application architecture.
- Staff Augmentation Service
- 2025
- Industry: Health and Fitness
Initial Task
Description
Our client signed a contract with a major enterprise, which added 20,000 potential users to the app. Among the requests was to deliver live-streamed mindfulness sessions and post-session analytics for the institution’s employees. The legacy system could not meet the performance requirements.
As a result, the company contacted Touchlane with the directive to rebuild the core user experience with a real-time frontend and a backend capable of handling WebSocket connections and third-party API integrations. Also, isolated service failures were not to turn into platform-wide outages.
Technology stack
Challenges
Technical challenges
1/ The user analytics dashboard required full-page refreshes to update data
2/ Live events were not possible, and adding support for a new wearable device demanded weeks of work
3/ The PHP monolith’s database became a single point of failure.
Lack of in-house expertise
The client’s developers had strong PHP expertise but limited experience with real-time systems, or microservice design patterns, as well as modern frontend state management at scale. They needed senior-level expertise to build the new system and maintain the legacy platform during the transition.
Process
Phase / 01.
Parallel development and architecture
Touchlane’s developers were included directly in the client’s product team. The first two weeks involved mapping every data flow and integration point. The team designed a clear migration path, as follows:
– New features would land on the new stack
– User authentication was temporarily to rely on the legacy system.
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Our engineers architected a backend of six discrete Node.js microservices: User Management, Challenge Engine, Real-Time Event Service, Wearable Data Ingestion, Analytics, and Notification Service.
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Redis handled event broadcasting and caching. This design allowed the Wearable Ingestion service to fail but not affect live challenge updates.
Phase / 02.
Building the core experience
Our team adopted a vertical slice approach. The first deliverable was a new Corporate Analytics Dashboard for administrators. This React application, fed by the new Real-Time Event Service, displayed participant progress with live updates without page refresh.
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Next, our engineers replaced the user-facing challenge pages. The Touchlane team built a library of reusable React components (Personal Metrics, Live Session Viewer) with TypeScript to guarantee data consistency. We implemented WebSocket connections to push updates for new activity syncs from wearables.
Phase / 03.
Migration, launch, and handoff
We migrated users in batches by corporate clients. Our developers implemented feature flags to toggle between the old user dashboard and the new React application. For the launch with the financial institution client, all 20,000 users were able to start on the new platform.
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Touchlane paired with the client’s team throughout the whole development process, and beyond it. We conducted code reviews and created detailed runbooks for each new feature.
Overall Result
Real-time features became the client’s primary product differentiator and resulted in three new enterprise contracts within the quarter after launch. The company’s internal developers now spend less than 15% of their time on operational issues. They have assumed full ownership of the new codebase and have since expanded it.
Touchlane provides ongoing staff augmentation for the client, helping the company avoid high costs of hiring an in-house team. Moreover, the existing product staff stay focused on the roadmap, leaving coding to us. One dedicated full-stack developer provides support for further integrations, such as Garmin and Whoop, and is working on a new predictive analytics module.
