Danbury Hospital doctor granted a $2M endowment wants to bring health care to ‘the most vulnerable’

News-Times – Sunday, June 8, 2025
By Rob Ryser

A veteran physician at Danbury Hospital who speaks four languages and shows a special interest in the underserved has been granted a $2 million endowment to use at her discretion for internal medicine advances.

Precisely where Dr. Aparna Oltikar spends the endowment money depends in part on conversations she is yet to have with community members served by Danbury Hospital and its New Milford campus.

“Your immigration status or the color of your skin should not determine how you recover from your stroke. We are a community hospital, and our job is to take care of every single person in our community,” said Oltikar, who was born in India and raised in Puerto Rico. “So by engaging the community at the very onset (of spending endowment money), we have a better chance of having a larger impact.”

A physician for 30 years, Oltikar decided her senior year at Harvard University that instead of becoming an organic chemist she wanted to pursue the “human side of science.” She shared her vision after she was named the first recipient of the Joseph Belsky Endowed Chair in Medicine.

“The chair is named for Dr. Belsky, who has been such a giant in the Danbury medical community … having just turned 99 years old,” said Oltikar, who is the chair of medicine and vice president of medical affairs at Danbury Hospital and the New Milford campus.

“He is a brilliant guy who practiced endocrinology and could speak as eloquently about congestive heart failure as about diabetes,” Oltikar said of Belsky, a former chief of medicine at Danbury Hospital who spent three years in Hiroshima, Japan, studying the effects of radiation.

The endowment – a gift that is invested so the interest can be used perpetually at the chair holder’s discretion – was made recently by a private donor who asked not to be named publicly.

The Belsky endowment becomes the 19th such endowed chair for Nuvance, the hospital’s parent company, which recently merged with the much larger health system Northwell in New York. Endowed chairs already exist in clinical areas, including emergency medicine, cardiology and surgery.

The difference about the Belsky chair in medicine is that is recognizes an often-overlooked field in clinical care, Oltikar said.

“It’s easy for people to see the glamour or the sexiness of a new DaVinci surgical robot. People with endowed chairs in oncology and surgery use things that are highly technical, fancy and high profile,” Oltikar said. “But internal medicine is not glamorous or high tech; it’s bread and butter.”

Oltikar, who continues to practice in the hospital alongside her administrative duties, treats patients with conditions such as pneumonia, congestive heart failure and strokes.

“If medicine is a mosaic, the fancy and shiny tiles are things like neurology and surgery. Basic internal medicine is like the grout that holds all the tiles together,” she said. “Without the grout, there’s no mosaic, but it’s not often people see the value of the grout.”

Though it’s not clear how much interest the invested $2 million endowment could earn each year, Oltikar sees a lot of ways the money could help those who need preventative health care the most, especially if the yield is as much as 10 percent annually.

“In an environment where there is decreased funding … we are in a very dangerous time in our history where the already vulnerable members in our community are going to be more vulnerable,” she said.

To counteract that trend, Oltikar said she would like to use the funds to make more medical services mobile and community based, and “invest in programs that improve outcomes for patients facing complex challenges,” among other priorities.

A typical problem among immigrants and other underserved communities who don’t have health insurance is that someone may be screened for high blood pressure and be told to see a doctor immediately but they don’t because they can’t afford a $250 visit fee.

“In six months if that person has a stroke, they are incapacitated and not able to care for their family. But we have medications that have existed for 50 years that cost pennies to treat people with high blood pressure,” Oltikar said. “So if $200,000 is the (endowment yield), we can do a lot with that number.”

Access this article at its original source.