Austria and San Diego-based mySugr has added coaching to the premium version of its mySugr Logbook app, the company announced this week. 

"What we want to do is create a digital diabetes clinic," North American Managing Director Kyle J. Rose said today at the Digital Medicine Connect event in Boston. "What we’ve decided to do is actually work with diabetes educators as coaches. Because, as someone said earlier today, maybe getting more data isn’t the question, but getting useful data and making that practical is what we should be concerned with."

mySugr tapped diabetes educator Gary Schneider, author of the book 'Think Like a Pancreas', to lead a team of live 1-on-1 diabetes coaches who will work with users, drawing on their logged data as well as information they provide through unlimited in-app messaging. The coaching is only available to people who have already been using the app for a little while and have logged some data, and there are a limited number of sign-ups per week. If the service is full, users can be placed on a waiting list.

The coaching is meant to fill in the gaps between provider visits and help users with particular needs and challenges in their lives such as training for an athletic event, adjusting to changes in their schedule, or just generally improving their diabetes management.

MySugr also recently announced a partnership with Abbott in the UK. Abbott has a wearable interstitial glucose monitor called the FreeStyle Libre Flash Glucose Monitoring System. The system, which is not yet available in the US, consists of a patch that continually reads blood glucose and an NFC reader device that the user can hold over the patch to check their glucose levels. Now, users with the mySugr app and NFC-enabled Android smartphones will be able to skip the reader and beam the data into their Logbook app, via Abbott's LibreLink app.

The company has previously worked with Roche to incorporate its Logbook app with Roche's AccuCheck line of glucometers.