Professor Sir Bruce Keogh said a central system is needed to oversee patient safety across the NHS.
He said because the nature of the current system was made up of hundreds of organisations, measures introduced to improve patient safety or address specific issues were not put into practice across the whole service.
Sir Bruce said there needs to be a way of ensuring those directives were taken up across the industry.
He told the Sunday Telegraph: “People accept that their disease has risks, they accept that the treatment may carry some risks.
“What they should never have to accept is that the way we design and deliver our services adds to that risk.
“Where there are solutions to significant safety problems, I would like to see a system that mandates the use of those solutions through the NHS.
“The difficulty that we have is that the NHS is a conglomerate of hundreds of organisations, all of whom have their own boards and people in them with their own views.”
Sir Bruce stressed their needs to be a way of “being clear” about when recommendations to implement new solutions – in the form of new devices or technology – “should override the financial considerations”.
Inspectors have said the NHS is struggling to cope with staffing shortages, rising demand and increasing numbers of patients with preventable illnesses.
A Care Quality Commission (CQC) report warned that services are at full stretch and the quality of future care is precarious.