BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. — The doctors wanted to talk about illness, but the patients — often miners, waitresses, tree cutters and others whose jobs were punishingly physical — wanted to talk only about how much they hurt. They kept pleading for opioids like Vicodin and Percocet, the potent drugs that can help chronic pain, but that have fueled an epidemic of addiction and deadly overdoses.

“We needed to talk about congestive heart failure or diabetes or out-of-control hypertension,” said Dr. Sarah Chouinard, the chief medical officer at Community Care of West Virginia, which runs primary care clinics across a big rural chunk of this state. “But we struggled over the course of a visit to get patients to focus on any of those.”

Worse, she said, some of the organization’s doctors were prescribing too many opioids, often to people they had grown up with in the small towns where they practiced and whom they were reluctant to deny. So four years ago, Community Care tried a new approach. It hired an anesthesiologist to treat chronic pain, relieving its primary care doctors and nurse practitioners of their thorniest burden and letting them concentrate on conditions they feel more comfortable treating.

Since then, more than 3,000 of Community Care’s 35,000 patients have seen the anesthesiologist, Dr. Denzil Hawkinberry, for pain management, while continuing to see their primary care providers for other health problems. Dr. Chouinard said Community Care was doing a better job of keeping them well over all, while letting Dr. Hawkinberry make all the decisions about who should be on opioid painkillers.