A common use of a patient registry is for medical research. This involves members of the registry team using the data to answer questions about the condition or intervention being monitored. Registry-based research can lead to a better understanding of the patient group itself, what medical care works best, and the outcomes associated with a particular condition.

Quality improvement
By providing feedback to medical professionals, registries can be used to facilitate quality improvement of healthcare services. This can usually be described as service evaluation or clinical audit, Feedback will often include benchmarks that providers can measure their performance against, whether this be national averages or accepted targets for process measures or the patient outcomes associated with them.