When you evaluate an engineering partner, ask three things. Do they work inside your backlog and sprint cadence, or run a parallel one? Do their engineers join your standups and talk directly to your clinicians and lab staff? How soon are they shipping against your codebase rather than writing specs about it?

The embedded model trades handoff latency for domain context. It is the reason we place forward-deployed engineers inside client teams from our Delaware base: they pick up the domain quickly and ship inside the client's own sprint cycle instead of a separate one. https://nonstopio.com/forward-deployed-engineers/