Washington ? As Congress and others lobby to create an independent board to review the safety of prescription drugs, a dozen states — including Kansas — have been doing just that.

State officials who manage billions of dollars in annual drug purchases joined together in a project to help them comparison shop, picking the most effective and safest choices from a slew of competing drugs. Their efforts had an unexpected result.

By taking a closer look at a half-dozen existing studies, the project raised safety questions about Vioxx as early as 2002. Two of the earliest member states — Oregon and Washington — used that independent analysis to remove Vioxx from lists of preferred drugs that doctors use when prescribing medication for Medicaid recipients.

Dr. John Santa, medical director of the Drug Effectiveness Review Project, said the project has developed into virtually an independent office of drug safety. The project provides information to the states about the drugs it studies. It’s then up to the states to decide how to act in response.

Missouri applied the Vioxx warning to a computer program that in fewer than three seconds judges whether the state should pay for prescriptions, said George Oestreich, director of Missouri’s Medicaid pharmacy.

After that, when a pharmacist tapped in prescription information, the computer program knew to block payment for Vioxx if the patient had a history of cardiovascular disease or if the prescribed dose was higher than 25 milligrams and was to be taken longer than five days. In those cases, an electronic message would flash the answer back to the pharmacy: Missouri won’t pay.

The three-year, $4.2 million undertaking provides its now 12 member states credible, systematic and neutral reviews of drug safety and effectiveness, said Santa.

The project’s members are the states of Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming and two nonprofit health groups, from California and Canada.