Agile Health Inc., Behavioral Health Systems Inc., CareHere, GeoBlue and more.

I stopped in to hear from a presentation by Anthony Armando, the vice president of national accounts at one of these companies, Interactive Health.

Armando talked for about 30 minutes. The most compelling points he shared?

• Interactive Health clients are seeing 6.1 percent reductions in their annual medical spend.

• On average, its members return to work sooner than claimants who don't participate in its programs — nine days sooner from worker's compensation claims and 16.8 days sooner from short-term disability.

Obviously, that's important to employers, which is good for Interactive Health. Founded more than 20 years ago, the company has seen its revenue grow by 20 percent a year over the past few years, Armando said.

Interactive Health and its competition can credit the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for at least some of their growth.

"It's good for both employees and employers," Armando said of the law.

How so? Well, for starters, the incentives built into the legislation allow employers to qualify for health plan premium reductions of 30 percent (and more) based on whether their employees are enrolled in wellness programs.

Longer-term, the more that employers expect — perhaps even demand — that employees remain in good health, the lower their health care costs will go.

Armando's presentation looked well-attended. That's good, because until now, few employers seem interested in taking advantage of the wellness incentives in the PPACA.

That was a key finding of a study released earlier this month by Virgin HealthMiles and Workforce magazine. Only a quarter of the companies surveyed said they were planning to use the law's wellness provisions to enhance employee health benefits programs.

In part, that's because there remains much skepticism about wellness programs, especially among chief financial officers who control the purse strings.

This helps to explain why Interactive Health stresses that its business is about more than getting people to feel better; it's crucial, the company says, to prove that it helps to drive down costs, and it goes to a lot of trouble and expense in collecting the data it needs to persuade companies to commit.

What choice does it have, really? I mean, it's impossible to imagine a future in which employers spend more and more on wellness without a crystal-clear understanding on their return on investment.