Ascensia Diabetes Care’s Contour Diabetes app — a mobile tool to monitor trends in blood glucose levels that connects to the Contour Next One glucometer — has received yet another update. As of Monday, iPhone users can transfer blood glucose and carbohydrate data from their app to records kept within the Apple Health platform.

After opting in, data collected through Ascensia’s app will automatically populate within the Blood Glucose area of the Apple Health app, according to Ascensia. Similarly, information captured through Apple’s service can be brought into the Contour Cloud service, although Ascensia’s app is not yet able to display these data.

As of now, the Contour Diabetes app is sitting at a 2.5 star rating in the App Store, with many of the detracting reviews citing the app’s siloed design as a major shortcoming. Rick Stadterman, the global head of R&D at Ascensia Diabetes Care, told MobiHealthNews that these responses drove the company to update its offering.

“We started to receive feedback from users of the Contour Diabetes app via App Store reviews and social media that being able to view their data in Apple Health Kit was critical for the management of their health,” Stadterman wrote in an email response. “It became apparent that this was a priority for people with diabetes, so we created the integration with Apple Health and launched it as soon as possible.”

The Contour Diabetes app also received a substantial facelift back in May with the inclusion of the My Patterns personalized feedback and coaching feature.

Why it matters

Breaking down the walls between Ascensia and Apple’s respective device ecosystems reduces the barrier to entry for iPhone owners with diabetes who might not otherwise be on board for a connected glucometer, Stadterman explained.

“The benefit for users is that those who are already using Apple Health to track their health can now see their blood glucose data from the Contour Next One meter in the same application,” he wrote. “This can make diabetes management easier by providing users with the option to automatically transfer their blood glucose and carbohydrate data into Apple Health.”

What’s the trend

Ascensia’s connected diabetes monitoring platform has steadily seen regulatory and usability gains over the past couple of years, and in September enjoyed a strong endorsement from a triple-blinded, multisite, independent research study comparing commercially available and FDA-cleared blood glucose meters. As such, it’s little surprise that the company would be interested in better aligning itself with Apple, which has substantially doubled down its mobile health efforts in 2018 with the launches of its personal health records feature and, more recently, its ECG-equipped smartwatch.