The Oncology Institute, Inc.
Moat Score — The Oncology Institute, Inc.
Total Moat Score
11 / 30
| Moat Factor | Score | Analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Intangible Assets Patents, trademarks, brand strength, or regulatory licenses that protect a company's products or services from being freely copied by competitors. | 2 / 5 | Starling Oncology has built years of proprietary clinical and actuarial data on managing cancer-patient populations under capitation, which is genuinely hard to replicate quickly, but it holds no patents or exclusive technology and its brand itself is newly re-launched after the August 2026 rebrand from The Oncology Institute. |
| Cost Advantage A durable ability to produce goods or services more cheaply than competitors — through scale, unique access to cheap inputs, location, or process — that lets a company undercut rivals or out-earn them at the same price. | 1 / 5 | The company reported a 2025 net loss of $60.6 million and operating loss of $36.1 million, indicating it does not yet have a structural cost advantage over traditional fee-for-service oncology groups or scaled value-based competitors like Evolent Health. |
| Pricing Power The ability to raise prices without losing meaningful business, because the product or service is differentiated, mission-critical, or has few good substitutes. | 2 / 5 | Capitation and gain/loss-sharing rates are negotiated with large managed-care payors who hold significant leverage, and the largest single customer represents about 14% of patient services revenue, limiting the company's ability to dictate contract terms. |
| Network Effect The product or service becomes more valuable to every user as more people or organizations use it, making an established leader harder to displace. | 1 / 5 | There is a mild data-flywheel effect where more covered lives under risk contracts improve the company's cost-of-care modeling, but this is a weak, indirect effect rather than a true network effect between patients or providers. |
| Switching Costs The money, time, or operational disruption a customer would face switching to a competitor, which locks in existing customers and supports renewals. | 3 / 5 | Multi-year capitation and gain/loss-sharing contracts with health plans, and 20-year management services agreements with the underlying physician practices (TOI PCs), create real contractual and operational switching costs for both payors and physicians once embedded in the platform. |
| Efficient Scale A market that can only profitably support a small number of players, so incumbents face limited threat from new entrants even without other defenses. | 2 / 5 | Operating across 17 markets in five states with roughly 2.0 million value-based patients gives Starling Oncology meaningful scale versus single-market oncology groups, but national competitors like American Oncology Network and OneOncology operate at comparable or larger scale, limiting any efficient-scale moat. |