Dr. Marshall Ruffin of Mathews has joined the volunteer efforts of the Mathews Broadband Advisory Board to increase opportunities for telehealth in the county.

A board-certified general internist who retired as a practicing physician but is still busy with his health technology consulting company, Ruffin Health LLC, Ruffin told the board via Zoom during Tuesday’s meeting that telehealth can be used to improve the health of the residents of Mathews. The longtime owner of a weekend retreat in Mathews, the doctor said that he moved to the county a year ago and became interested in what the broadband board was doing, since his field of expertise has been health technology during much of his nearly 40-year career at such institutions as the Inova Health System in Northern Virginia and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

From the beginning of his career in the 1980s, Ruffin has been interested in technology and in developing ways to use data from electronic records to predi...