Expansion to multiple patient pathways for the same Patient Agent

[JRPearson500]

We have considered the breast cancer pathway in detail and used it to inform the development of the Alpha data model. The breast cancer pathway has helped us shape the structure of all three layers, but in particular it has influenced the attributes of the Environment.

An issue with the breast cancer pathway is that it is quite linear and very well-specified. There is therefore a risk that either: a) the resulting Alpha data model is not flexible enough to incorporate another pathway, or even multiple pathways at the same time (although we have tested the thinking of our current model on other types of cancer pathway); b) a significant amount of work is required in order to expand the Alpha data model to other patient pathways.

Throughout the development of the Alpha data model, we have been careful to try and maintain the generalisability of the model. This has been achieved by implementing quite multi-purpose Patient and Environment objects, which can in future be subclassed to more specific versions, and deferring all pathway-specific logic to the Intelligence Layer, which the user is free to implement. In principle, we therefore believe that no significant changes should be required for the core codebase (which contains the Patient and Environment agents) to work in multiple patient pathway scenarios. Instead, the complexity would fall into the Intelligence Layer.

Nevertheless, there may be certain elements in some pathways that require changes to the core codebase, for instance the social care or mental health pathways may require features that are not yet implemented, such as patient mood - this will require further consideration for how to record such observations (e.g. in python, calling the setattr method on the agent objects - note this is currently used to set patient agent kwargs as attributes)