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Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Lamar Alexander on Tuesday indicated the committee should consider developing guidelines for how health apps could use and share patients' data. Health apps are a burgeoning field of interest as smart devices, such as certain blood pressure monitors, become more popular and as wearables like the Apple Watch, which can monitor a person’s heart rate, venture further into the medical field. Some apps connect directly with a doctor’s electronic health record system. (Clason, 5/7)

Kaiser Health News: Feds Want To Show Health Care Costs On Your Phone, But That Could Take Years
Federal officials are proposing new regulations that for the first time could allow patients to compare prices charged by various hospitals and other health care providers using data sent to their smartphones. Donald Rucker, who coordinates health information technology policy for the Department of Health and Human Services, said he expects that the rules, first proposed in March, will give patients new power to shop for care based on price and quality. (Schulte, 5/7)

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday called for the Trump administration to give providers more time to implement part of a major rule to promote interoperability in healthcare. The CMS and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT issued two rules in February that target information blocking, implement interoperability and require all health IT companies to use the same application programming interface two years after the policies are finalized. Hospitals also will be required to send doctors notifications when a patient is discharged. (King, 5/7)

There’s lots of buzz around Verily and Calico, the Alphabet units single-mindedly devoted to the life sciences. But in many respects, the conglomerate’s most ambitious health play is at its core: Google. The company is working on a dizzying array of initiatives in health and medicine. There’s a fitness tracking app. There’s the famous search engine, the first stop for many people with a medical complaint. There’s the cloud division, which is one of the vendors jockeying for contracts with hospitals shifting to centralize their data storage on the internet. (Robbins, 5/8)

Practice Fusion, an electronic health records vendor acquired by Allscripts Healthcare Solutions last year, has received a grand jury subpoena as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Allscripts disclosed the subpoena in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week. The subpoena, which Practice Fusion received in March, relates to "certain business practices engaged in by Practice Fusion," according to the filing, including the company's compliance with the anti-kickback statute and HIPAA. (5/7)