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There’s a lot of concern today that paying fees to medical providers for each service may lead to unnecessary care. But there’s no easy way to replace the massively complicated fee-for-service system.

Your doctor may secretly think you’re making too many office visits and getting too many drugs and tests.

A survey of primary-care doctors conducted in 2009 finds that 42% of the 627 respondents believed the patients in their own practice were getting too much care. Just 6% of doctors believed their patients were getting too little care. (The rest thought the level of care was just right.)

With doctors often pressed for time, a new federal campaign aims to to improve communication by getting  patients to ask more questions and prioritize their concerns before a visit, today’s Informed Patient column reports.

The U.S. economy added more jobs than expected last month. And the health-care industry showed particular strength, with 31,300 new jobs — higher than the average monthly increase seen in 2007, before the recession hit.

Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart showing sector-by-sector job growth, and here’s the overall report, which shows non-farm payrolls rose by 117,000 while the unemployment rate dropped slightly to 9.1%.

The medical residents starting their training today belong to a generation that doesn’t think twice about broadcasting even intimate details of their lives via texts, Twitter and other social media.

That can get tricky when those doctors’ lives begin to include patients.

It’s no secret that there’s a shortage of physicians that will likely only get worse when the health-care overhaul law brings an estimated 33 million new people into the health-care system starting in 2014.

Talk to anyone for very long about how to improve health care in the U.S. and you eventually hear something along the lines of: “We have to start paying physicians for getting and keeping people healthy instead of for doing as many procedures and tests as possible.”

Should electronic medical records be rolled out chiefly according to the needs of physicians and other providers?

That’s the question debated by two physicians in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine. Anwar Hussain, a physician at UHS Hospitals in Johnson City, NY, argues the affirmative in  his commentary.

Given the growing cost of malpractice suits from missed or delayed diagnoses in the emergency department, hospitals and their liability insurers are mining resolved claims for lessons on how to reduce such errors, today’s Informed Patient column reports.