Community-pharmacy screening can identify people at elevated risk and create opportunities for earlier preventive care, yet a positive screening result does not itself establish that care has been completed. This conceptual article examines the sequence between risk detection and verified follow-up as a boundary-spanning process involving patient interpretation, referral initiation, information transfer, scheduling, care entry, and return of disposition information. Drawing on pharmacy screening, referral-closure, interprofessional-integration, and access-equity evidence, the article develops a Boundary-Spanning Detection-to-Care Model in which progression depends on successful transitions between analytically distinct states rather than on referral issuance alone. The model distinguishes acceptance of a referral from the receiving system’s capacity to act on it and treats closed-loop referral as verified progression or resolution. It also anticipates that attrition may arise from workflow ambiguity, capacity constraints, communication failures, or patient choice and that these losses may be socially patterned. The model therefore shifts evaluation from counting positive screens and recommendations toward stage-specific measures of handoff, scheduling, care entry, feedback, and unresolved status. The central claim is conditional: pharmacy screening contributes most reliably to preventive care when detection is coupled to visible, executable, and accountable cross-organizational pathways.
