Dr. Jasmina Krstic, MD Internal Medicine · Norwalk, CT

The text arrived at 10 p.m. on a Friday, and Jasmina Krstic assumed the worst. Her patients don't reach out on weekends unless something is wrong — most of them apologize for calling at all, so profusely she ends up reassuring them for it. But nobody was sick. A patient had just gotten her results back from the California bar exam, and she wanted her doctor to be among the first to know she'd passed.

Another doctor might have found it strange. Krstic found it amazing.

The reaction is as good a one-line audit as any of the practice Krstic has built in Norwalk — a concierge internal medicine clinic deliberately small enough that the doctor-patient relationship runs in both directions, at any hour, about bar exams and grandchildren as readily as blood pressure. It took her most of a career, and two countries, to arrive at it.

The path to an American medical license does not shorten for anyone — not even for someone whose friends call her "the lucky girl." Krstic and her husband, Milan, came to the United States because she won a Green Card in the Diversity Visa Lottery on the very first entry she ever submitted. The luck ended at the border. She had already graduated with honors from the University of Niš School of Medicine in Serbia, and she arrived in New York at thirty-one a trained physician with limited English. She worked as a babysitter and behind the counter at the Banana Republic in Rockefeller Center — a doctor folding shirts — until Milan could support them both while she studied for the USMLE full-time, a dictionary at her elbow, relearning her own profession in a second language. She matched into internal medicine residency at Mount Sinai, a training culture she describes as a shock in nearly every particular from the one she'd left. She finished it, board certification and all, then spent five years at a small Upper East Side practice, admitting her own patients as an assistant attending at Lenox Hill Hospital.

What that history built is a doctor with an unusually precise sense of what medicine is supposed to feel like — and a low tolerance for the versions of it that don't.

The Philosophy

Krstic's practice runs on a simple conviction: the value of a doctor is not only what she does when a patient calls, but that the patient knows she can be called at all.

The second pillar is prevention, which she treats as the substance of the work rather than its preamble. She keeps current with the literature, attends conferences, and spends visit time on the unglamorous fundamentals — food, exercise, screening tied to family history. "Food is like medicine," she says. She wants to keep her patients, in her words, out of the woods — away from the point where medicine can no longer really help.

How It Works in Practice

That conviction took its current shape by way of contrast. After Manhattan, Krstic moved her family to Connecticut and spent the next stretch of her career inside corporate medicine — five-to-seven-minute appointments, schedules that were not hers to control. "It wasn't my decision so many times," she says — whether to extend a visit, whether a complex patient needed more of her. She is careful not to single anyone out; in her telling, the problem is the model, not one employer. Nova MD Wellness Clinic, opened on the first day of January 2024, is the direct answer to those years: a deliberately small panel, visits that run as long as the situation requires, patients who reach her directly instead of through a triage line.

The less visible half of the model is that Krstic initiates contact herself. She has noticed that some patients, not wanting to bother her, simply go quiet after an annual physical. So she watches for the silence and calls first: how are you doing, did you do the thing we discussed, do you need anything. Because the panel is small, she says, she remembers every patient's plan without opening a chart.

Where the Instinct Came From

Krstic grew up in Serbia on a street that functioned like an extended family — children called for each other at the door and roamed unsupervised until dinner, and her closest friends today are still the ones from kindergarten. The street had another peculiarity: it was full of hospital people. A nurse across the road, technicians, physicians, even the hospital's chief executive, all within a few houses. She was playing doctor with her dolls before the first grade. She never seriously considered being anything else.

The formative event came at the end of medical school. Krstic had just finished a rotation in the coronary unit when her father, then fifty, suffered a massive heart attack. She was the one there. She gave him CPR herself. It is why she wanted to become a cardiologist — a plan that the move to America, the relicensing, and the years of starting over ultimately foreclosed. What survived is the cardiologist's reflex, redirected: an internist who treats prevention as urgent, because she has seen, at the closest possible range, what there is to prevent.

Life Outside the Office

Part of the reason Nova exists at all is arithmetic. Corporate medicine was costing Krstic eighty-hour weeks, and the years it cost her most were her son Uros's youngest ones. She never compromised her standards of care — but the price of building a career on that schedule was not being as present for him as she would have liked. Uros is eighteen now. Her daughter, Lara, is nine. Nova is, among other things, the choice not to make that trade a second time — the practice that lets her appear at an 11 a.m. school art project instead of disappearing into the schedule that took those years.

Weekends belong to a close circle of friends split between New York and Connecticut — the sustaining force of strong female friendships is, she says, one of the constants of her life — and a perfect ordinary day is unheroic by design: a walk on the beach, sitting in Bryant Park doing nothing, a summer Monday movie night in the city.

For her fiftieth birthday last year she finally walked the Brooklyn Bridge with Milan and the kids — a New York item left undone through all the years she lived there — ending at Grimaldi's, the famous pizzeria under the bridge in DUMBO.

Every year, without exception, the family spends a week in Greece — "our second home," she calls it, a neighbor to the country she came from. This year: Paros, an island she's never seen.

Back in Norwalk, the practice stays small on purpose, and the phone stays on. Somewhere tonight a patient will text her about something that isn't strictly medical — a test result that changes a life, a worry that needed saying out loud, a piece of good news that couldn't wait. Krstic will read it, smile, and not find it strange at all.