Figure 1

Recruitment and study procedure including loss to follow-up. GP practices = general practitioner practices. * Details of discontinued GP practices: high work load and lack of staff. ** Details of invalid data: Enrolment in contrary to the inclusion criteria (patients were not member of a statutory health insurance or had not received repeated antihypertensive medication) or questionnaires were missing. *** Details of discontinued patients in both study arms: 1) Intervention group: 171 patients missed at least one follow-up (31.0%). Thereof data of 88 patients are completely lost (15.9%) (loss of T1, T2, and T3) and data of 83 patients (15.0%) are partially available (loss of T1, T2 or T3). 2) Control group: 211 patients missed at least one follow-up (37.1%; including 1 GP practice* with 3 active patients). Thereof data of 86 patients are completely lost (15.1%) (loss of T1, T2, and T3) and data of 125 patients (22.0%) are partially available (loss of T1, T2, or T3). Number of patients available for each analysis is listed in Table 1. Reasons for discontinuation of the patients: patients’ desire (N = 241), change of GP practice (N =18), cardiovascular death (N = 2), other death (N =10), loss of GP practice (3 patients), other cause (N = 65), missing Documentation (N = 41).