The aim is to provide faster, more efficient care for patients and to bring down waiting times.
Health Secretary Alan Milburn sees an increase in day surgery - where a patient undergoes an operation without an overnight stay in hospital - as key to meeting the government's pledge that no-one will wait more than six months for treatment by 2005.
It is planned to establish diagnostic and treatment centres to specialise solely in day surgery.
This will ensure that planned operations are not interrupted, as they often are at busy district general hospitals, by the demands of emergency treatment.
Summit
The new initiative will be coordinated by Professor Ara Darzi, of Imperial College, Science, Technology and Medicine, London, who has been appointed as surgical adviser to the Department of Health.
One of his first tasks will be to chair a summit of all the hospitals that are performing below average numbers of day surgery cases.
It will look at what can be done by these hospitals to improve day surgery rates.
Mr Milburn said: "NHS waiting times are falling, but the gap between the best hospitals and the worst hospitals remains too wide.
"Day surgery holds the key to faster, more convenient treatment for patients. More day surgery means less waiting for patients.
"Reforms to protect planned operations from emergency cases are already in place in some NHS hospitals. I want to give other NHS hospitals the chance to learn from the best."
There are nearly 3,200,000 day case operations currently carried out in the NHS.
A recent report by the Audit Commission found that the NHS could increase the number of day surgery cases by around 120,000 a year.
Paul Baskerville, President of the British Association of Day Surgery, said: "We have long recognised the potential for treating many in-patients as day surgery cases, and that this could lead to a reduction in waiting lists and times and free-up hospital beds."