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Vardenafil is the generic name for Levitra, and women aren't supposed to use it .

According to the online newsletter "NextGov," which first reported the story, the VA pharmacist then checked with the medical facility where the drug was supposedly prescribed. The pharmacist's suspicion was confirmed: The information was wrong. The health-records query had returned another patient's information.

Now that's a prescription for catastrophe.

Scary, no It gets scarier. According to the VA, the pharmacist quickly reported the problem and even sent along a hard-copy printout. But the bug turned out to be very difficult for VA techs to reproduce. And a work-around -- repeating the query when suspect results appeared -- proved to be unreliable. So on March 1, the VA cut off all remote electronic access to that DOD medical records system.

As of mid-March, that access was still cut off. The first problem has been fixed (it was due to multiple instances of a unique identifier, which only showed up at peak-traffic times). But another, thornier glitch has turned up -- and this one yields incomplete patient data, which is almost as dangerous as incorrect data. Until it's fixed, the portal stays offline.