Baystate Health says 293  patients at Noble Hospital in Westfield, Mass., underwent colonoscopies with improperly disinfected equipment.

Baystate is notifying the patients there’s a “small risk” they were exposed to blood-borne pathogens and should be tested for hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV. They received colonoscopies at Noble between June 2012 and April 2013.

Staff manually cleaned the endoscopes between uses but didn’t sterilize one part of them in an automatic processor, according to Dr. Sarah Haessler, an infectious disease physician at Baystate and the Springfield-based hospital group’s head epidemiologist.

Baystate says proper disinfection began in 2013, but staff at the time didn’t “recognize” the risk to previous patients.

“The best thing that we can ascertain is that there was a communication error and there wasn’t an understanding  on the part of the people that were cleaning the scopes that this would be a problem,” Haessler says.

Haessler says staff turnover has made it more difficult to get answers.

Inspectors with the state Department of Public Health identified the problem last month.

Baystate Health will pick up the costs for those tests, Haessler says, and pay for treatment if anyone is infected.

Baystate inherited this issue. It only purchased Noble in July, more than two years after the botched disinfections.