Elizabeth Murray, who has died of cancer aged 63, set up the pioneering University College London (UCL) eHealth Unit in 2003. Just four years later it was one of the largest and most interdisciplinary digital health units in the UK.
Murray was an innovator throughout her career, first on where to train doctors and later in spearheading the use of the internet to improve patient care. After qualifying as a GP in 1991, she became increasingly involved in medical education and made her name with research that demonstrated the then controversial approach that medical students could be taught clinical medicine in a general practice environment just as successfully as in a hospital. “We challenged the paradigm – a lot of people were very cross,” Murray recalled.
The study was the beginning of the shift by medical schools to community-based teaching for clinical students. The experience also gave Murray an early taste of what it was like to challenge the medical consensus.
From the late 1990s, Murray was an early mover in using the internet and web-based tools to give patients a more hands-on role in treatment choices and to improve healthcare. She used a Harkness fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, in 2001 to study the impact of the internet on the doctor-patient relationship and from then on digital health became the focus of Murray’s research.
Back in the UK, as she set out to establish the UCL eHealth Unit, “people told me there was no such thing as e-Health,” recalled Murray. Disregarding the sceptics, the unit developed computer-based treatment decision aids for doctors and a range of web-based tools for patients. These included the Down Your Drink online treatment programme for hard-to-reach problem drinkers who could access the programme anonymously. The unit’s HeLP-Diabetes online self-management programme for type 2 diabetes was the first web-based app adopted by NHS England for national roll-out and remains in use today as Healthy Living for People with Type 2 Diabetes.
Murray was as committed to implementation as to research and in 2015 established HeLP-Digital, a not-for-profit community interest company with UCL and Whittington Health, to disseminate and implement HeLP-Diabetes, with support from the Cabinet Office.
Ever at the vanguard, as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold Murray launched her final project to bring together cross-disciplinary expertise, including a specialist commercial app developer, to develop and deploy the Living With Covid Recovery app, which went “live” in August 2020. This provides long Covid patients, their clinicians and carers, with an internet-based monitoring and rehabilitation tool and was swiftly taken up by a number of NHS Trusts in England. Murray remained at the eHealth unit until ill-health forced her to retire.
Murray (who used her mother’s maiden name) was born in London to John Powell-Jones, a career diplomat, and Ann (nee Murray), later an author on Chinese history and sculpture. Announcing at the age of two that she was going to be a nurse, Murray was asked if she realised that women could be doctors. “Then I’ll be a doctor,” she replied. “And I never changed my mind,” she said just before she died. Due to the diplomatic postings of her father and then her stepfather, the childhood home of Elizabeth and her two brothers, Mark and Robert, moved between the Congo, Brazil, China, Egypt and Iceland.
When local schooling became impractical, she attended Bedales boarding school in Hampshire, in 1978 securing an exhibition to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, to study physiological sciences; she graduated in 1981.
A master’s degree in 1982 at Wolfson College, Oxford, in reproductive endocrinology inspired her interest in combining clinical practice with academic research and “the sheer joy of finding things out”. Clinical training was completed in 1985 at what was then the London Hospital Medical School. But a year working in obstetrics and gynaecology left Murray with the professional frustration that “there was more to a woman than her pelvis”.
After a break in Australia, she returned to England where an unexpected job as a locum GP led in 1989 to a GP traineeship at the James Wigg general practice in Kentish Town, London. In 1991 she started her research career and an enduring relationship with UCL as a clinical lecturer alongside practising as a GP.
Murray cited her lifelong feminism – “my standing up for women, helping junior female researchers” – as well as a commitment to transparency and fairness as being at the core of her professional life. The eHealth unit was an environment where male researchers learned to be comfortable being in the minority. In 2013 Murray received a chair at UCL as professor of eHealth and primary care – perhaps later in her career than would have been the case for a man – and she recalled that many next-generation female GP academic researchers told her they were delighted for Murray but also “glad for all of us”.
In 2018, Murray entered into a civil partnership with her long-term partner, Debby Lennard, a senior civil servant. Plans to split their time between England and France were thwarted by Murray’s diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer in early 2022.
Murray is survived by Debby, her brother Mark, and her nieces and nephews, Sarah, Luke, Agnes, Stella and William.
• Elizabeth Murray, medical researcher and GP, born 8 February 1960; died 7 April 2023
