Background disease measures / probabilities (e.g. based on patient age etc.) #17
Description
For more complex and long-term patient pathways, it may be useful to model the chance that a patient spontaneously develops an illness during the simulation.
To make this kind of event realistic, it would be useful to know the probability of a patient getting ill given their demographics and historical health record. Determining these probabilities could come from a lookup table, which would have to be made available to the Intelligence Layer. Alternatively a more complex version could be some model which takes in relevant patient features and returns the distribution over illnesses.
This feature could be enabled and disabled by the user via a config attribute.
Note a subtlety: patient dynamics are currently fully governed by the Intelligence Layer. This means that a patient state is essentially static until it interacts with its next environment. A patient therefore can only “develop an illness” during an interaction. We could of course model that illness as having started before (by artificially setting an earlier start date) but this kind of dynamic may be limiting. Instead, a future version of the model could enable patient dynamics even without an environment.