In collaboration with Diabetes League, Axians Belgium developed Zoet Zwanger, a digital tool designed to follow-up women with gestational diabetes after pregnancy.
Pregnancy subjects the body to blood sugar fluctuations, which can contribute to the onset of diabetes. This temporary condition, known as gestational diabetes, can occur in women who are not diabetic or reveal diabetes that had previously gone unnoticed. After giving birth, the diabetes disappears but these women have a higher risk to develop type 2 diabetes.
Gestational diabetes affects around 4,000 women a year in Flanders. In November 2022, Diabetes League, a Belgian non-profit patient organisation for diabetes prevention and support, awarded Axians, the VINCI Energies ICT brand, the contract to design, create and manage an innovative tool to early detect and prevent the development of type 2 diabetes.
In operation since August 2023, the digital solution Zoet Zwanger (lit. “sweetly pregnant”) developed by Axians aims to encourage women with gestational diabetes to take the necessary measures to prevent and detect diabetes as soon as possible.
“It is crucial to be aware of risks such as premature labour, pre-eclampsia and high birth weight that can complicate childbirth,” advises Arnout Wouters, General Manager at Diabetes League.
Postnatal care and type 2 diabetes
“Zoet Zwanger is a software application that tracks screenings for up to 10 years after childbirth,” explains Roel Vermeersch, Business Unit Manager at Axians Belgium. “This tool encourages women to take a preventive blood test and send their results to the other project stakeholders: healthcare providers and the Zoet Zwanger team.”
Zoet Zwanger now monitors more than 20,000 women.
The aim of this solution is to improve postnatal care and prevent type 2 diabetes through a simple, user-friendly and secure data collection process.
Roel Vermeersch explains: “The application is based on a flexible BPM (business process management) solution, which monitors each communication flow, captures the responses and sends automatic reminders. This framework makes it easier to implement future enhancements without complex development work.”
Its advantages include the ability to monitor asynchronous processes involving different people at various stages, record each stage along the way, and show the status of each ongoing process.
A multilingual tool with 10-year follow-up
In order to reach the largest number of women, Zoet Zwanger is accessible in several languages: currently Dutch, French and English. “In the future, Diabetes League hopes to add other languages such as Arabic,” says the Axians Business Unit Manager.
He emphasises this solution’s advantages over conventional methods for gathering data on this type of disease: “Previously, women had to self-monitor and perform periodic testing over 10 years. Most people tended to forget. Thanks to this application, Diabetes League can remind them better and collect the data in a central database for reporting purposes.” Zoet Zwanger now monitors more than 20,000 women.
From cancer to diabetes
Before the Zoet Zwanger project with Diabetes League, Axians was able to build on its experience with the Belgian Centre for Cancer Detection. As Roel Vermeersch, Business Unit Manager at Axians Belgium, explains: “We’ve been developing solutions for this customer for 20 years to help them improve the early detection of cancers (of the breast, colon and cervix). We also developed a tool capable of sending every person of the target group in Flanders (1.5 million people every year) a cancer screening recommendation based on their age and sex. The software manages all the follow-up of the results from hospitals and laboratories.”
02/14/2025
