We address the modification of open heavy-flavor mesons in a hot medium of light mesons within an effective theory approach consistent with chiral and heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetries and the use of the imaginary time formalism to introduce the non-zero temperature effects to the theory. The unitarized scattering amplitudes, the ground-state self-energies and the corresponding spectral functions are calculated self-consistently. We use the thermal ground-state spectral functions obtained with this methodology to further calculate 1) open-charm meson Euclidean correlators, and 2) off-shell transport coefficients in the hadronic phase.