The Health Secretary said the NHS needed to learn from other sectors, such as retail, with one in five Christmas presents now bought online, and 500 per cent increase in the number of people who bought Christmas presents on tablets last year.
“If you look at banking, half of people do their banking online, that rises to three quarters of under 35s,” Mr Hunt said. “The retail banks have actually cut a third of their costs by persuading us to do all the work that they used to do.”
He said a revolution in the budget air industry had been possible because of technology, with 70 per cent of ticket sales now made online.
“You look at those changes and you think of what is possible in our NHS, and I think we are on the cusp of one of the most exciting changes in delivery of health care that will ever happen in our lifetimes,” Mr Hunt said.
“The biggest myth that technology can help us to bust is this idea that because of financial pressure, because of the ageing population, because of the huge challenges we face we inevitably have to accept that our care will become less personal and less high quality than we have been used to.
“Technology will help us do exactly the opposite, it will help make care more personal, more tailored, more in tune with our demands as an increasingly affluent and demanding population,” he said.
Speaking at the Health and Care Innovation Expo, the Health Secretary said technology would mean increasing use of apps to help those with long-term conditions manage their care, with more use of online booking of appointments, as well as medical consultations online.
At the same conference, NHS leaders suggested that patients do not trust the Government over the future of medical records because they have been lied to about NHS plans in the past.
Plans to extract patient data from GP files have been put on hold for six months amid concerns about confidentiality and criticism of the way the national data-sharing scheme has been communicated.
Roy Lilley, a former NHS trust chairman, said that better use of data was vital to improve the quality of care.
But he said politicians had made it more difficult for the public believe their commitments about the future use of the records, because previous ministers’ pledges – such as a promise to have no top-down reorganisation of the NHS – had been broken.
He said the real problem for many critics of the scheme was “we don’t trust the government.”
Mr Lilley, who runs a website for healthcare managers, said: “They lied to us about the Health and Social Care Act. They could be lying to us about the use of our data. It’s been a balls up. It’s a balls up of the politicians’ making. We can learn. There is much to criticise, but criticise the politicians – and not the NHS.”