The industry spent nearly $3.5 billion on such payments in the five-month period from August through December 2013, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which released data on 4.4 million payments.

The massive trove of information named companies and many of the recipients. Also listed were types of payments, with details down to travel destinations. About 546,000 clinicians and 1,360 teaching hospitals received payments. Some doctors had ownership stakes in companies.

The release is part of a new initiative called Open Payments, mandated by the Affordable Care Act. It was intended to allow patients to look up their own doctors online, but that isn't fully ready yet. In future years, the information will cover a full 12 months and will be easier to search, officials said.

Susan Phillips, a senior vice president for Penn Medicine, the university's health system, said the school did not have access to the data until Tuesday afternoon and could not immediately provide details.

The data indicate that the bulk of the Lilly money consisted of royalties for Amyvid, the company's radioactive tracing agent used to scan for signs of Alzheimer's disease. It was developed at Penn.

The Novartis payment was listed as "compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program."

Consumer groups called the data release a much-needed step toward transparency about relationships that can influence patients' care. But doctors and industry said the government rushed to release the data, and raised questions about accuracy and lack of context.

The administration said it was not pointing a finger at the medical profession or the pharmaceutical industry.

"Open Payments does not identify which financial relationships . . . could cause conflicts of interest," said Shantanu Agrawal, the agency official overseeing the project. "It simply makes the data available to the public." Under Obama, government policy has shifted toward opening the books of the medical profession.

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New data on financial ties in medicine