2020 has been the year of COVID-19. The healthcare sector has been on the frontlines of battling this pandemic. There was significant projected demand for rapidly-manufactured ventilators during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Massachusetts was hard hit during the early stages of this pandemic, and the state’s largest healthcare delivery organization brought together the open source community to develop new technologies and processes for rapidly developing resources needed to treat predicted growth of infections. The open source community came together to develop rapid prototype ventilators that could be potentially mass produced in quick succession. Many of these devices did not have built-in monitoring capabilities, so there was an anticipated need for staff to adequately track alarms in a centralized manner for these devices. The Open Ventilator Monitoring Project addressed this need by rapidly creating a system that allows hospitals to monitor alarms and patient data from ventilators, integrating the status of multiple devices into a single display, similar to a central nursing station. During the design process of this project, an additional need was brought to the team’s attention. Due to infection control procedures that require closing doors to patient rooms, clinical staff were unable to hear alarms from ventilators that were not already integrated into a traditional central monitoring system. The team then pivoted to develop a solution to modify the hardware and software system to include the ability to auditorily monitor and alert based on the sound pressure of these ventilator alarms. To date, the team has delivered a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which has undergone limited lab testing in the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Medical Device Interoperability and Cybersecurity Program Lab (MGH MD PnP). The project has longer term goals of safety/integration, and ultimately, deployment within settings such as field hospitals. It is expected that this project's capabilities may be useful to many hospitals, extending beyond the constantly-changing emergency of COVID-19's spread. While the software has been designed to monitor ventilators, the project's architecture - utilizing APIs and plugins - is extensible to other network environments and other device types. Ultimately, hospitals in the U.S. have not experienced a shortage of traditional ventilators, and so our software was not needed during the Covid-19 crisis. However, we present a framework for rapidly developing software in crisis situations along with a set of lessons learned for those who follow in future crises.