Good !
Then, your developer should look for python smbus that support read_block() since, I think the link I provided only support read_byte(), because your have 2 bytes to be read to get the 12bits of the ADC, but some other libs are providing that.
For better tests, maybe your should try “i2cget -y 0 0x4d 0x00 w” to see if it answer with 2 bytes properly.