Getting involved in hepatitis C virus (HCV) research just got a whole lot easier. A new iPhone app called C Tracker will allow patients to record their daily experiences with hep C and share their health data to researchers across the country to help drive real-world research about the condition, according to a press release from Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP), which developed the new technology.

The new tech tool, which is available on the App Store under Apple’s HealthKit platform, hopes to capture the real-time daily effects of HCV around the world and potentially help drive improvements in future treatments, said researchers involved in developing the app.

Patients using C Tracker will be able to record their health, medication use and quality of life over the course of months or years of living with the virus. With participant permission, the app will also allow researchers to collect a user’s daily activity and health data as a means to get an inside look into real-world outcomes, both before and after treatment.

Along with C Tracker, Boston’s CHIP program has also included a new framework called C3-PRO (Consent, Contact and Community framework for Patient Reported Outcomes), which will link more than 100 academic medical centers with the information on an open-source data platform to analyze and share their research.

“Traditional clinical trials are plagued by abysmal accrual rates, slowing progress in discovering cures,” said Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, the principal investigator for the new health app, in the press release. “We foresee a future where the ResearchKit apps like C Tracker lower the barrier to participation and speed medical progress.”