Hiram Profitt was a patient in Cincinnati who died on September 19, 1984, after receiving an excessive dose of heparin, an anticoagulant. Later accounts tying his death to hospital worker Donald Harvey describe Profitt’s death as an accidental killing within a broader pattern of hospital deaths linked to Harvey, rather than one of the deliberate poisonings or suffocations attributed to other victims.

At the time, Harvey worked in the Cincinnati VA medical system in roles that gave him access to seriously ill patients and to medications. Profitt’s death did not prompt an immediate homicide investigation, arrest, or separate criminal charges; it became part of the case assembled after a later suspicious death led to Harvey’s arrest in April 1987. No other suspect has been identified in Profitt’s death.