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State health workers still often can’t use computers, access shared drives and get to important data a month after a cyberattack crippled Maryland’s health department, the head of a union representing agency employees said Friday. They’ve received little information about what’s going on and are preparing for the possibility that their systems could remain impaired for some time. (Thompson, Wiggins and Cox, 1/8)

A Health and Human Services agency is encouraging healthcare providers, public health agencies and other organizations to consider adopting a new data standard for documenting patient addresses in healthcare. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on Friday released the final version of Project US@, a technical specification designed as an industrywide data standard for patient addresses. ONC has been working on Project US@ with standards development and health IT organizations since launching the effort in early 2021. (Kim Cohen, 1/7)

Psychologists, social workers and therapists employed at Kaiser Permanente's Oakland and Richmond, California, clinics will go on strike for a day to protest Martin Luther King Jr. Day not being a paid holiday. The strike is set to take place Monday, Jan. 17, outside Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center and corporate headquarters in downtown Oakland. Around 200 workers plan to march alongside allies and elected officials. The strike is the latest move by Kaiser Permanente employees to address issues of structural racism within the organization, said Ixayanne Baez, a marriage and family therapist at Kaiser Permanente's Oakland clinic. (Devereaux, 1/7)

KHN: Black-Owned Hospice Seeks To Bring Greater Ease In Dying To Black Families

This time, it didn’t take much persuading for Mary Murphy to embrace home hospice. When her mother was dying from Alzheimer’s disease in 2020, she had been reluctant until she saw what a help it was. So when her husband, Willie, neared the end of his life, she embraced hospice again. The Murphys’ house in a leafy Nashville neighborhood is their happy place — full of their treasures. “He’s good to me — buys me anything I want,” she said, as she pulled a milky glass vase out of a floor-to-ceiling cabinet with mirrored shelves. (Farmer, 1/10)

The Americans With Disabilities Act has been in force for more than three decades. But do doctors understand their legal obligations under the law — and are they doing all they can to accommodate patients with disabilities? In a word: No. That’s the message of a study in Health Affairs that points to significant knowledge gaps among the providers — and suggests that nearly three-quarters of outpatient physicians don’t understand how to accommodate their patients’ disabilities. (Blakemore, 1/9)

Beginning this month, a new law that was years in the making bans certain unexpected medical bills. However, advocates say it’s important for consumers to still be on the lookout for these charges and to know what steps to take if they get hit with one anyway. “Unfortunately, providers aren’t going to write ‘Surprise!’ on top of a now-illegal bill,” said Caitlin Donovan, a spokeswoman for the National Patient Advocate Foundation. “It’ll be up to patients to recognize when the new protections should apply.” (Nova, 1/7)

There will be no crowded lobbies or $100 chair rentals at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. But the trillion-dollar life sciences industry’s biggest annual meeting, forced onto Zoom by Omicron, will still attract attention from around the world as investors, executives, and others look to answer critical questions about the future of sectors like biotech and health tech. Is there a second act for mRNA companies? Was teletherapy just a pandemic fad? Can Biogen salvage its foundering treatment for Alzheimer’s disease? And will 2022 be the year of the buyout? (1/9)