Amalga was used to tie together many unrelated medical systems using a wide variety of data types in order to provide an immediate, updated composite portrait of the patient's healthcare history. All of Amalga's components were integrated using middleware software that allows the creation of standard approaches and tools to interface with the many software and hardware systems found in hospitals. A physician using Amalga could obtain within seconds a patient's past and present hospital records, medication and allergy lists, lab studies, and views of relevant X-rays, CT Scans, and other clips and images, all organized into one customized format to highlight the most critical information for that user. In clinical use since 1996, Amalga had the ability to manage more than 40 terabytes of data and provide real-time access to more than 12,000 data elements associated with a given patient.