White paper from Renesas on using BFEs GPIO to control or monitor further battery status. Link here (PDF)
In an MCU plus battery front end (BFE) controlled battery pack, GPIOs may operate as an alternate protection FET control path where low-side FETs are preferred. Use cases include extending the upper voltage range of battery IC to higher voltages by shutting down the high-side charge pumps and repurposing a high-side solution to a low-side solution with minimal BOM changes. A solution with the ISL94216 device acts as a model for a low-side GPIO controlled solution; however, in this white paper, the techniques and principles for low-side GPIO control generally apply to battery ICs with GPIOs (such as the ISL94216) and for battery pack MCUs with GPIOs (such as the RL78). The ISL94216 BFE simplifies the adoption of low-side control considerably by offering bit settings to swap the control logic from the high-side FET pins to the built-in GPIOs.