The Obama administration decided last week to make all payment information public, excluding for privacy purposes cases in which doctors performed procedures on fewer than 11 patients.

Consumers can now see aggregate sums paid to a doctor, how that amount compares to their peers and which doctors made the most from the program. They can also see the type and how many procedures a doctor billed Medicare for.

“It will benefit not just consumers and the taxpayers but ultimately the health-care sector because it will shine some light in some dark corners where, frankly, health-care providers should improve the way they practice,” said Joe Antos a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The AMA, which fought to keep the information private said the data lacked context. Some doctors may be making more than the average from Medicare because they see a disproportionately high number of elderly, not because they are improperly billing the agency, according to Ardis Dee Hoven, president of the AMA. In other instances, a doctor may be doing more of a certain procedure because they have specific expertise in that area or better outcomes, she said.

Patient Complexity

“We are bracing for some significant unintended consequences,” Hoven said. “Patients may not get the right data and the outliers are going to have to stop what they are doing and be replying to folks day after day when nothing is out of kilter and they are just doing their jobs.”

The data do not include information on what percentage of a doctor’s practice is Medicare versus private insurance patients. Some of the numbers may be inaccurate and doctors haven’t been given a chance to review it and make corrections, Hoven said.

“We fear this information can be easily misinterpreted without a complete understanding of patient complexity and the cumbersome Medicare billing system,” said American College of Cardiology president Patrick O’Gara in a statement.

Eye Medicine

Medicare. which covers 49 million people, spent $5.6 billion on payments to ophthalmologists, driven by new treatments for blindness. That was second only to internal medicine doctors, generalists who were paid a total of $8.7 billion in 2012. Cardiologists, third in Medicare’s classifications, received $5 billion.