Microsoft Amalga was initially called Azyxxi and was being developed by doctors and researchers at the Washington Hospital Center's emergency department in 1996 before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 after heavy adoption in the health-care industry.

Amalga is a platform designed to retrieve, collate and display patient information from different sources such as scanned records, X-ray images, magnetic resonance imaging scans, electrocardiograms and laboratory results, as well as other related information like patient personal records. It is designed to interface with already existing information systems so that the organization is not required to know in advance how information is to be applied specifically, allowing it to provide real-time clinical information about patients in a single view, as well as financial and administrative information that may be related to the patient.