The release on Wednesday of Medicare payment data is getting mixed reviews from doctors. Many say they favor sharing information but worry that the data presented by Medicare omits important details and may mislead the public and paint an unfairly negative picture of individual doctors.

Dr. Gary Heit, a recently retired neurosurgeon in Redwood City, Calif., said he thought some of the details revealed could be useful to patients who want to make sure that the physicians they choose are experienced — say in carotid-artery surgery, where more operations performed correlate with better patient outcomes.

“Being able to track the number of procedures is incredibly valuable,” Dr. Heit said. “I think the ability to see the number of cases a physician does is really important.”

However, the data only include treatments given to certain Medicare patients.

Many other doctors worried that the data released was incomplete and often misleading. In some cases, enormous payments that seem to be going to one doctor are actually distributed to multiple others. But the data tables do not reveal that the money was shared.