The century-old Indian traditional medicinal system, Ayurveda, could find a new friend in modern science if it effectively leveraged the reach and power of information technology to expand the global footprint of the ancient medicinal system, experts said.

"Ayurveda can play a critical role in modern times", S D Shibulal, co-founder IT firm Infosys, told a gathering at an event organised at the World Ayurveda Congress here today.

With rising cost in modern health care system, a large part of the population was out of the reach of such a sytem. The rising cost towards healthcare was almost unsustainable for developing countries.

Ayurveda could play an important role by its very nature of being "patient-centric", "holistic" and "preventive" and being more accessible to the population.

However, currently Ayurveda did face certain challenges arising out of lack of a more evidence-based approach and clinical research. Ayurveda could use IT to address these issues. "You can use technology to collect information, store it, mine it and use it for evidence based approach".

Ayurveda needed to have more distributed approach. "IT could be used to collect data in a standardised manner over a long period of time and over vast geography", he said.

IT could be used to share the best practices and for sharing awareness and "creating a brand for Ayurveda".

Ayurveda known for its practices of families keeping their medicinal formulations as closely guarded secrets, should shed this approach and adopt a more "shared knowledge approach".

Such individual-held knowledge "was not a scalable approach", he said while making out a case for Ayurveda turning global. "IT could be used for documentation, creating and transferring knowledge across the globe", he said. IT could be leveaged to create a strong data base of plants, he said citing an example.

"Unless we find a way to preserve knowledge, we might lose an invaluable wealth of information", he said.

Speaking on the occasion, A Jayakumar, Secretary-General, Vijnana Bharati, said IT could be used to make Ayurveda into a prime science in the world. "It has the potential to do so", he said. There were several countries where there was a demand for Ayurveda to be made accepted and recognised and IT could help achieve it.

M K Shankaralinge Gowda, IAS, Secretary, Medical Education Department, Government of Karnataka, said that the traditional old Indian system, Ayurveda and the modern IT system could be leveraged in a mutally beneficial manner.