'NHS IT should be run like Apple' – health service director responds to Hunt

Agrippa also believes that people themselves are holding back the utilisation of existing technology.

"It's having the right people. Fresh minds, not dead wood, as it were," said Agrippa.

"I hate - I detest - having a hundred meetings to decide on what colour to make a screen, or where we should put a button," he added. "The central issue should always be ‘How do we get data to people?'.

"You can imagine if Steve Jobs and Apple were in charge of the NHS, then every two years you'd have an all-singing, all-dancing patient system. Because what they would do is focus on not having 300 meetings about it, and being tied up in policy. They'd focus on patients' need to get their data, and it would look snazzy, and it would work. That's the agenda."

Agrippa also railed against claims that allowing patients access to their own medical data is just too risky.

"The risk is greater to not do it than to leave our country or citizens as patients in 1998 or the 100 BC era, as opposed to bringing them into this era with a 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 2 per cent risk of losing their phones, or them being hacked."