Vishal Khetpal

Vishal Khetpal is a physician and journalist with a courtesy faculty appointment at Medill. He is an assistant professor of medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and practices as a preventive cardiologist with the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute.

Khetpal is a columnist at STAT News, where he writes the Workup, a column examining the promises and pitfalls of prevention. His writing explores the intersection of medicine, technology, and policy, with particular attention to how innovation in medicine reaches society, and how social, economic, and cultural forces shape the practice of medicine.

He has written about health and medicine for more than a decade, with work appearing in STAT News, Slate, MIT Technology Review, Undark, and VICE, among other publications. His writing has addressed topics ranging from the outlining the direct-to-consumer medicine movement and the use of untested health care algorithms during the COVID-19 pandemic, to articulating the commercialization of medicine and public health concerns regarding the use of compounded semaglutide. He previously served as an assistant producer for the Nocturnists, a medical storytelling podcast, and contributed to its Stories from the Pandemic series, which was subsequently acquired by the Library of Congress.

Alongside his journalism, Khetpal maintains an active clinical career in cardiology, with interests in cardiometabolic medicine and health care delivery. Before joining Northwestern, he completed his medical degree, internal medicine residency, and cardiovascular disease fellowship at Brown University. Prior to medical school, he earned a master's degree in global health from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis.