Pūahoaho: updated information about Pharmac’s priority lists September 2025

Update Medicines

Pharmac’s Pūahoaho Report provides the latest information about applications for medicines, vaccines, and related products that we’ve assessed for funding. Proactively releasing this information is part of our ongoing commitment to transparency.

Application priority lists

Every year we receive over 100 funding applications from health care professionals, consumer groups and suppliers. These applications include requests to fund new medicines and to widen access to medicines that we already fund.

We ask our clinical advisory committees to assess the available evidence and recommend whether we should fund, defer, or decline the applications. With their advice, we work to complete an assessment, including a health economic appraisal if required.

We apply the Factors for Consideration throughout our assessment of an application. The factors consider four areas: health need, health benefit, suitability, and costs and savings.

Factors for Consideration(external link)

Once the assessment is complete, we take the application to a quarterly internal prioritisation meeting and add applications to one of the following priority lists:

  • options for investment (OFI)
  • only funded if cost neutral or cost saving
  • recommended for decline.

Priority lists for funding applications and previous Pūahoaho updates(external link)

Options for investment list

We rank applications on our options for investment (OFI) list from highest to lowest priority but keep these rankings confidential so that we can negotiate the best prices with suppliers.

As of 17 September 2025, there are 115 applications on the OFI.

Prioritisation activity since March

Since March’s prioritisation meeting we ranked 10 new proposals on the OFI list, and re-prioritised 23 others. Re-prioritisation can occur due to more information becoming available, or a change in an application’s Factors for Consideration in comparison to other medicines being considered for funding. Detailed descriptions of indications available on the Application Tracker.

New proposals ranked: 

Applications re-ranked:

Only if cost neutral or cost saving list

If our assessment confirms an application does not provide any additional health benefit compared to treatments we already fund, it may be ranked on the only if cost-neutral or cost-saving list. We would look to fund these applications if we negotiated a deal that would be cost-neutral or cost-saving.

Prioritisation activity since March

Since March’s prioritisation meeting we ranked 18 applications on the only if cost neutral or cost saving list (detailed descriptions of indications available on the Application Tracker on our website):

Recommended for decline list

There are a range of reasons a funding application may be added to the recommend for decline list. Our expert clinical advisors may have recommended that the funding application be declined, or they may have provided a positive recommendation, but we’ve found:

  • other more clinically preferred medicines for the same condition are now funded
  • the medicine would provide no additional benefits over other treatments we already fund
  • the medicine or may be harmful
  • the application has been superseded by another funding application
  • no company is supplying the medicine in New Zealand.

When applications are added to this list, they become inactive and we stop progressing work on the application. While applications may be listed on the decline list, they are only formally declined after public consultation to ensure we haven’t missed anything important.

More about this process: Declining inactive funding applications(external link)

If we decline an application, it means the medicine won’t be funded for the use requested at this time. It does not prevent us from reconsidering funding for the medicine in the future if new information becomes available.

Prioritisation activity since March

Since the last prioritisation meeting in March, we ranked 22 applications on the recommended for decline list (detailed descriptions of indications available on the Application Tracker):