TULSA — The alarming statistics on Oklahoma’s opioid crisis may be getting a lot of headlines recently, but it’s something the OSU Center for Health Services has been watching with increasing alarm for some time.

OSU-CHS President Dr. Kayse Shrum tells KRMG they’ve known for a while that they needed to do something, and began formulating plans for how best to address the issue.

They’re uniquely equipped to deal with it because they have a telemedicine presence in every county in the state, and they were pioneers in training doctors to treat addiction.

“Some of us in medical school didn’t get that much training,” she told KRMG Friday. “We were one of the very first medical schools to put this into our medical school curriculum.”

Still, until now, there was no training program for addiction specialists in the state.

That will change, as OSU-CHS will create two fellowships a year to train those specialists.

That’s just one aspect of the center’s approach to tackling the opioid crisis.

They will establish the OSU Center for Wellness and Recovery, the school announced, focusing both on treating pain and addiction, and researching how addiction occurs.

They will work in conjunction with the Oklahoma State Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, as well as 12 & 12, a longstanding treatment program based in Tulsa.

The goal is to move Oklahoma off the list of worst states for prescription drug abuse, and put it on the map as a center for advances in research and treatment.

“It’s important for us to turn that around and become the leaders in correcting this problem,” Shrum said, “and really looking at research, and driving best practices, and training a work force of primary care physicians that can recognize and manage, so that the patients that really need to get to a specialist can actually get to a specialist the few specialists that we have in this state.”