FAQ
Organized by situation. Find your domain below or browse the general questions at the bottom. If your question is not here, reach out directly — eric@emerpartners.com.
Theme 01
Green status reporting is the most common symptom of the problem EMER Partners is designed to address. Status reports are written to demonstrate compliance with contractual milestones — not to surface the clinical adoption gaps, vendor misalignments, and operational friction that typically develop below the reporting threshold.
The Project Intelligence Health Check exists precisely for this situation: when the formal reporting says everything is fine and your operational leadership is telling you something different. The two-week diagnostic surfaces the divergence between reported and actual status, identifies the risks that are accumulating invisibly, and gives leadership a decision-ready picture of where the implementation actually stands.
Five deliverables over two weeks:
EMER Partners operates on behalf of the client organization, not the vendor. The intelligence layer is designed to give leadership an accurate picture of vendor performance and delivery reality — which is structurally independent of what the vendor is reporting.
This independence is a feature, not a conflict. Leadership needs an intelligence source that is not filtered through the vendor's contractual incentives. EMER Partners provides that.
Many Healthcare IT clients move from the Health Check to ongoing AI-Augmented Delivery Oversight — an embedded intelligence layer that provides continuous RAID+ logs, weekly executive updates, and early warning signals for the remainder of the implementation lifecycle.
Some clients use the Health Check as a standalone engagement — they need the initial diagnostic and the remediation roadmap, and their internal team executes from there. Both paths are appropriate depending on what the organization needs and has capacity to sustain.
All healthcare engagement work is deployed inside the client's BAA-covered environment. This is non-negotiable and applies to all document types — healthcare meeting transcripts, implementation documents, status reports, and project artifacts routinely contain PHI even when they appear not to.
No healthcare client data passes through EMER Partners' personal systems or consumer AI platforms. The intelligence infrastructure is configured to run within the client's existing Microsoft Azure, Google Workspace, or locally hosted environment before any engagement begins.
Theme 02
A standard RAID log tracks Risks, Actions, Issues, and Dependencies. It is a documentation tool — useful for audit trails and status meetings, but not designed to produce intelligence.
RAID+ adds two critical elements:
The + is the differentiator. A standard RAID log captures what people remember to enter. RAID+ surfaces what the activity itself is signaling — including signals that would not survive the translation from meeting room to status report.
A PMO is an organizational function — it manages process, governs methodology, and coordinates across delivery teams. It is infrastructure. EMER Partners is an intelligence layer — it converts what the delivery infrastructure is already producing into structured, decision-ready intelligence for leadership.
A PMO and an EMER Partners engagement are not mutually exclusive. Organizations with established PMOs often engage EMER Partners because the PMO produces reporting but not the portfolio-level intelligence that leadership needs. Organizations without PMOs engage EMER Partners to provide the intelligence layer without the overhead of building a PMO first.
The first structured RAID+ log and executive intelligence update are delivered within the first engagement cycle — typically the first week. The early warning signal layer takes one to two cycles to calibrate to your specific portfolio and environment.
Most clients report that the most immediate value is not the first deliverable — it is the first conversation where a risk surfaces that was visible in the field but had not reached leadership. That typically happens within the first two weeks.
No. EMER Intelligence is tool-agnostic and methodology-agnostic. It works with your existing tools — Microsoft, Google, Jira, whatever your teams already use. It does not require your delivery teams to adopt new platforms, change their reporting format, or attend additional meetings.
The intelligence layer operates on the activity your teams are already generating. The output goes to leadership. The delivery teams continue working exactly as they were.
EMER Partners typically replaces or augments two things: the manual effort of compiling status reports for leadership, and the ad-hoc escalation process that currently substitutes for an early warning system.
It does not replace your delivery tools, your PM team, your reporting cadence, or your governance structure. It adds the intelligence layer that converts those existing elements into something leadership can act on.
Theme 03
Yes — this is exactly the deployment model. Microsoft 365 enterprise agreements include access to Azure OpenAI and Copilot Studio. Google Workspace enterprise agreements include access to Vertex AI. In both cases, EMER Partners designs and configures AI workflows to run inside your existing enterprise agreement, using the infrastructure you are already paying for and have already vetted through your compliance and legal teams.
This is the fastest and most cost-effective path to compliant AI deployment for most regulated organizations — no new vendor agreements, no new data processing addenda, no new compliance review.
Yes. For environments requiring complete data sovereignty — air-gapped networks, classified environments, or institutions where no data can leave the local infrastructure — EMER Partners supports locally hosted LLM deployment. The AI model runs entirely within your physical or virtual infrastructure. No data is processed externally at any point.
Locally hosted deployment requires more upfront infrastructure configuration but produces the highest level of data sovereignty available.
The system evaluates grant applications iteratively against formal NIH or NSF scoring criteria — the same criteria a study section reviewer applies. It identifies administrative gaps, formatting non-compliance, and alignment weaknesses before the application reaches a reviewer.
The review is structured, not generative. The system does not write grants or suggest scientific content — it applies the evaluation framework to what has been written and surfaces specific, actionable gaps. Researchers receive structured feedback they can act on before the submission deadline.
The system is deployed entirely inside the institution's own environment. No grant application data passes through consumer AI platforms.
File-triggered automation uses Microsoft Power Automate to monitor a designated SharePoint or Box.com folder. When a document is deposited into the folder, the workflow activates automatically — processing the document through the configured EMER Intelligence workflow and delivering the structured intelligence output without any manual intervention.
For example: a researcher drops a grant draft into a SharePoint folder. Within minutes, a structured review against NIH scoring criteria is delivered to a designated output location. No manual steps, no workflow to initiate, no waiting for a scheduled review cycle.
A Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP) is a required component of NIH grant applications, mandated under NIH NOT-OD-21-013. It documents how research data will be managed, preserved, and shared during and after the funded project period.
EMER Partners offers complete DMSP drafting and testing workflows — AI-assisted drafting against NIH requirements, gap testing against the NOT-OD-21-013 criteria, and compliance verification before submission. The workflow operates inside the institution's environment and does not expose research data to consumer AI platforms.
Theme 04
None. Expert delivery support through EMER Partners does not require PM knowledge, methodology familiarity, tool proficiency, or any prior delivery experience. The entire point of this engagement model is that the expert should not have to become a project manager — they should be able to deliver effectively with support that handles the delivery infrastructure on their behalf.
If you know your domain and you know what you are trying to deliver, that is sufficient. Everything else is Eric's job.
Yes — researchers managing funded projects, multi-site studies, or institutional research initiatives are one of the primary audiences for this engagement model. Research environments have specific delivery pressures: grant timelines, IRB compliance, sponsor reporting requirements, and multi-investigator coordination — all of which require delivery structure that most research teams do not have dedicated support for.
EMER Partners provides that structure without requiring researchers to develop PM competency or adopt PM tooling. The research continues. The delivery overhead is handled.
The structure is calibrated to the initiative and the expert's schedule — not a fixed weekly meeting cadence. In practice, most engagements include:
The engagement intensifies during high-pressure moments and lightens during stable periods. It follows the initiative, not a fixed schedule.
Small nonprofits, community health organizations, independent research labs, and resource-constrained teams are among the audiences this engagement model was specifically designed for. The engagement is scoped to what the initiative actually needs — not a standardized package with a fixed cost structure.
The first conversation is the right place to discuss what your situation requires and whether EMER Partners can provide it at a scale that fits your organization.
Data & Compliance
All healthcare engagement work is deployed inside the client's BAA-covered environment — meaning the BAA is between the client organization and their cloud provider (Microsoft, Google, or a locally hosted solution), not with EMER Partners directly. Client data never passes through EMER Partners' systems, so the conventional BAA model does not apply in the same way.
What this means in practice: you do not need to execute a new BAA with EMER Partners. You need to confirm that your existing cloud environment is BAA-covered, and EMER Partners will deploy the intelligence workflows within that covered environment. This is deliberately designed to simplify the compliance pathway — not complicate it.
Healthcare meeting transcripts, implementation documents, status reports, and project artifacts routinely contain PHI even when they should not. A clinical workflow meeting transcript may contain patient names, MRNs, or clinical details that appeared incidentally in the discussion. A status report may reference patient cohort data, test results, or clinical outcomes.
The only defensible position for a healthcare engagement is to treat all document types as PHI-risk regardless of apparent content type. Treating some documents as safe creates a classification problem that introduces exactly the kind of exposure a compliant deployment is designed to prevent.
Yes. The three deployment pathways are specifically designed to accommodate different data residency requirements:
The deployment pathway is selected based on your specific compliance and residency requirements, not on EMER Partners' preference.
The Practice
EMER Intelligence is a proprietary system — 17 structured workflows built and refined through production deployments in healthcare IT, research administration, and enterprise environments. It is not a methodology framework or a consulting approach. It is a system that runs.
The distinction from general AI consulting is threefold: EMER Intelligence is deployed inside the client's environment (not on external platforms); it operates under expert human direction at every stage (AI accelerates, Eric decides); and it produces structured, decision-ready intelligence output rather than reports or recommendations that require further interpretation.
Bespoke. Every client gets direct access to Eric Gottesman. There is no team, no account manager, no handoff. The practice is deliberately limited in scope — not because of a lack of capability, but because the value of the practice depends on the direct involvement of expert human judgment that cannot be replicated by delegating to a delivery team.
This means EMER Partners is not the right fit for organizations looking for a high-volume, low-cost solution. It is the right fit for organizations that need the quality of intelligence and judgment that a direct, senior-level engagement provides.
EMER Partners is actively building and operating AI systems — not describing AI as a future capability:
Current active deployments include an AI-driven grant review system for NIH/NSF submissions at a major research university and an academic promotion scoring system in active institutional use.
A direct conversation. Email eric@emerpartners.com or use the contact form. No intake process, no qualification call, no proposal required before the first conversation.
The first conversation covers your situation — what you are trying to deliver, where the pressure is, and what you need. From that conversation it will be clear whether EMER Partners is the right fit and what an engagement would look like. If it is not the right fit, Eric will tell you that directly.
Yes. EMER Partners is based in the NYC Metro Area and operates remotely across the United States. The intelligence layer and all engagement deliverables are designed to operate effectively in distributed environments — which is consistent with how most healthcare, research, and enterprise organizations operate today.
The fastest answer to any question about EMER Partners is a direct conversation. No intake process. Eric responds personally.